Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015, the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015 and the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2015. With the announcement of this legislation, the government has come up with total deregulatory savings since September 2013 of $2.45 billion. This is a significant achievement. It is one that is real. It has a positive impact on business, community organisations and families.

For the first time in Australia's history, a federal government is undertaking a thorough and accurate stocktake of all federal regulatory costs and is consistently measuring and reducing the cost of government red tape for Australian businesses, organisations, families and individuals. For the very first time, a federal government has, with a very high degree of accuracy, publicly reported to parliament a downturn in the total amount and cost of federal regulation. Australia now has its most precise, comprehensive and transparent program to reverse the growing costs of red tape in the Australian economy. The coalition's goal is simple. It is to make life easier for Australians and to make life easier for businesses to decide to invest and to create more jobs. After all, we must never forget that governments do not create jobs; it is successful private sector businesses that create jobs. Our job is to give them the opportunity and a clear, level playing field. Often when we interfere with that, all we do is destroy jobs.

Deputy Speaker, I can give you an example of that. We are now seeing for the first time in a while a clear distinction between the states of New South Wales and Victoria. In Victoria we have a rather left-wing government with rather socialistic ideals that believes in central planning and more red tape and more regulation for businesses. In New South Wales we have a government that believes in deregulation. We can do a lot here federally, but we still are a Federation and we still have state governments, so it is very interesting to look at the ABS statistics when they come out every month and do a bit of a comparison—almost a state-of-origin comparison—in relation to job creation. We may in New South Wales be defeated by Queensland, our northern neighbours, when it comes to State of Origin rugby league, but the state-of-origin competition in job creation between New South Wales and Victoria tells a very different story.

The ABS figures that came out just a week ago show that, since the start of this year, in New South Wales there has been a total of 122,000 new full-time jobs created. That is not a bad effort for the state of New South Wales: 122,000 full-time jobs since the start of this year. In comparison, let us have a look at Victoria. How many jobs, Deputy Speaker, do you think that they might have created during that time? You might think that, if New South Wales had 122,000, maybe Victoria created 100,000. You would be wrong. With 80,000 you would be wrong. With 60,000 you would be wrong. Maybe 50,000? You would think that, if New South Wales created 122,000 new full-time jobs, maybe the state of Victoria could have created 50,000. Deputy Speaker, if you guessed that, you would be wrong. You would have to go lower. If you guessed a duck egg, if you guessed that, since the start of this year, there had not been one single new net full-time job created in Victoria, you would be wrong. In fact, the number has gone backwards. They have lost 4,800 jobs, compared to New South Wales gaining 122,000. When it comes to the state-of-origin contest in job creation, New South Wales is putting the central-planning left-wing government of Victoria to shame. This should be a stark and clear warning, because the people that control the strings of that government in Victoria are the same people that control the strings of the Labor Party in Canberra. It is a clear and stark warning of the threat to job creation that the Labor Party pose.

An important element of this government's red tape commitment is dedicating parliamentary sitting days each year for repeal of regulation. These repeal days are for the purpose of repealing counterproductive, unnecessary or redundant legislation and consequently removing associated regulations. I would like to give an example of a piece of counterproductive and unnecessary legislation that we have repealed: the carbon tax. The idea of the carbon tax, if I remember the debates here, is that it was actually going to reduce pollution. That was what they told us. If they could pump up electricity prices, they somehow thought that that would reduce pollution.

As an example of unintended consequences and bad central planning, let me explain to you how that made air pollution significantly worse for residents in Sydney—particularly Western Sydney. As you put up the price of electricity and make it harder and more costly for people to turn their electric or gas heater on during cold winter nights in Western Sydney, people look for alternatives. One of those alternatives that people have in Western Sydney is simply to burn wood. You can get wood and burn it in a fireplace, and I think that, for the first time that I can remember, during the previous winter and the one before, I heard on Sydney radio firms advertising to sell firewood. Any petrol station that you go to in Western Sydney has piles of firewood packed up in bags for sale. The anecdotal evidence is quite clear: as you put up electricity prices, people look for alternatives to keep their houses warm and so burn wood.

We have a specific issue with air pollution in Western Sydney. The topographical nature of Western Sydney is that the air gets trapped in there and can recirculate, so we can have levels of air pollution for both coarse PM10 and fine PM2.5 particulate matter above the recommended standards from the World Health Organisation. This is a significant issue because particulate matter pollution actually kills people. Already I have seen some estimates of over 1,000 deaths in Australia because of air particulate pollution.

So what happens? The biggest single factor in fine particulate pollution in Western Sydney—around 45 per cent of it—is wood fires. What have we seen as the carbon tax put electricity prices up? We have seen an increase in the amount of wood being sold, an increase in the amount of wood being burnt and, the statistics from our air monitoring stations tell us, a significant increase in air pollution in Western Sydney.

Another example of what happens when you get a government that becomes overcentralised and tries to control things, of course, was the old Soviet Union. This week marks the 26th anniversary of probably one of the most significant events in world economic history. It occurred in September 1989 when Boris Yeltsin, then an up-and-coming member of the Soviet Politburo, made his first trip to the USA. When previous Russian leaders had gone to America, they had been taken on tours of American supermarkets to show them the produce and how a free market system where you reduce red tape actually produces more goods and services for the average person, but other Soviet leaders thought this was all put on for show and so simply did not believe what their eyes told them. In this case back in September 1989, Boris Yeltsin was driving around Houston and made an unscheduled stop. He was with his cars and said to call into a Randalls supermarket at random. One of the speculations is that he may perhaps have wanted to buy a bottle of alcohol. But he went into a typical, everyday Western supermarket.

He said in his autobiography:

When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.

There is the most famous picture of Yeltsin in that supermarket, looking over the produce in the frozen food section with his hands up in the air, simply saying, 'I cannot believe this.'

In fact a lot was made of this. There was a book called Down with Big Brother: the Fall of the Soviet Empirewhich recorded quite a bit of this unique event in history. I would like to quote from it. It says:

A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him.

…   …   …

It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours.

Lev Sukhanov actually wrote of this in his book, Three Years with Yeltsin. He said:

I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin's Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave the party and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion.

The book, Down with big brother: The fall of the Soviet Empire, says of Sukhanov's book:

Sukhanov devotes an entire chapter … to describing the wonders of the Houston supermarket. He records Yeltsin's amazement at being told that the store stocked 30,000 separate items. (The average Soviet store stocked fewer than 100 and many of these were usually "unavailable.") Every aisle was an eye-opener for the visitors from Moscow. Scarcely had they recovered from the shock of the cheese section, where they saw "red cheese, brown cheese, and lemon-orange cheese," than they were "literally shaken" by the quality of produce in the vegetable section.

It goes on:

On the plane, travelling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. "They had to fool the people," he told Sukhanov.

This is what happens when government employs red tape on the business community. It simply means that our business community cannot be as efficient as it otherwise would be. We need to realise that we rely on the private sector in this country to drive the economy. We rely on that entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of Australians getting out there, having a go and starting their own businesses. But far too many times we have governments employing red tape, adding costs and lowering our living standards. I can remember years ago when my father built a small factory, and some bureaucrat sitting in some building decided that for that building they would need to have four showers. That was over 40 years ago, and today I do not think anyone has actually ever used one of those four showers. The coalition is doing everything it can, determined to reduce red tape in this economy. It is important. We want to free the hands of our entrepreneurs—free them to get out and to create jobs for this country.

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