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

I am pleased to rise this afternoon to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2015) Bill 2015, the Amending Acts 1990 to 1999 Repeal Bill 2015 and the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 3) 2015. Before I start, this is potentially my last contribution to the House before we break for Christmas. The privilege of standing in this parliament and having one's say is one of the finest privileges any citizen can have in our democracy. I am looking forward to returning after Christmas and continuing the work that our parliament is doing.

I go the bills. Firstly, I would like to make a few remarks to reflect on the comments made by the member for Makin. When he spoke on this bill before question time he expressed his concerns about a potential rise in the GST and how this would increase the cost of living for people. That is fair enough. On this side of the parliament, we certainly do not want to increase the cost of living pressures on people. That is what I cannot understand: we hear speakers on the Labor side of parliament so incensed about the possibility of an increase in the percentage of the GST, yet the same people have their own policy to bring back a version of the carbon tax and call it an ETS. I cannot understand why members of the Labor Party come in here, like the member for Makin did during this debate, and talk about how concerned they are for the average Australian and how they could face a higher cost of living, yet, at the same time, the Labor Party promote bringing back the carbon tax in the form of an ETS. You simply cannot have it both ways. If you bring that back, all you do is increase the price of electricity and increase the price of road transport. So everything that is transported to our shops, everything that is manufactured in any way in a factory that needs power or electricity, and everything produced on a farm or in a mine increases in cost. The thing about an ETS is that it is designed to automatically increase year after year after year. I just cannot understand why the modern Labor Party go on about this when they get so upset about the cost of living. They want policies that will cause so much harm with the increased the cost of living, so much harm to the bottom line for Australia's citizens.

Secondly, the member for Makin talked about how terrible austerity measures are in many overseas countries. In that he does have a bit of a point. We saw scenes in Greece and other parts Europe with austerity programs that I hope we never, ever see in our country. We saw pensioners standing outside of banks in tears because their life savings were no longer there. That is something we never want to see in our country. We need to remember that countries in Europe that are imposing austerity programs do not do so out of pleasure or design; they do so because previous governments borrowed and borrowed, wasted that money and created obligations for future generations of citizens in that country.

I am sure that none of us in this parliament ever want to see a period of austerity in this country, but, if we are going to do that, what happens to this country in 10 or 20 years after the decision that austerity policies have to be brought in? People will go back to the decisions that we make now in this parliament to make sure that we were living within our means and were not continuing to borrow and borrow. With just the borrowings by the previous Labor government, our interest bill is already $1 billion a month. Let's be clear about that: from the taxes that are paid by wage and salary earners in this country, we have to tax them $1 billion a month, not to repay the debt but to just pay the interest. One billion dollars comes out of the economy every single month just to pay the interest on the reckless spending of the previous government. If we do not want to burden future generations of this country with the austerity measures that we have seen in Europe, it is up to our government, the parliament and every person who is elected to this House and the Senate to make sure that we are doing everything we possibly can to bring the budget back to surplus.

On the specific provisions of the bill, they send the message—and there are practical steps involved—that the government has a commitment to less red tape and fewer regulations to free the hands of the entrepreneurs of this country to get out there, invest in new start-up businesses and create new wealth and new jobs. That is the message that we are sending along with this bill. We have seen, time after time, the unintended consequences of overburdensome government regulation, where a government sees what it thinks is a problem, rushes in and says, 'We can fix that problem with regulation,' only to make the problem worse.

I would like to give some examples of that. There are many citizens in this country who have relatives and friends living overseas, and we transfer about $60 billion a year out of Australia. It is a form of private foreign aid. In fact, it is more than 10 times greater than our official government foreign-aid budget. That money is remitted in various ways. Some is remitted directly through the bank—where someone walks into a bank, puts their money on the counter and says, 'Send this to my cousin's bank account in the Philippines,' or Tonga or Vietnam or anywhere else in the world. Another way is through Western Union.

We also have what is known as the home remittance industry. This is where individual Australians have seen an opportunity in the marketplace because of the banks' extremely high fees and charges. They can provide this service efficiently and at a lot less expense than the banks. It has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars going to help many Third World countries and increase what is, effectively, our private foreign-aid budget.

Governments were concerned, and rightly so, about the possibility of money laundering and funds being diverted to terrorist activities. Various acts were brought in, not just in Australia but around the world. The result of this was the banks said they faced fines—our banks are all large multinationals and operate in many countries throughout the world—being imposed upon them in other jurisdictions. They found anyone involved in this home remittance business and shut them down. They closed their accounts down, one after the other. We had people who had built up their businesses over a decade, complying with every single piece of red tape and AUSTRAC regulations. They had crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's and had done everything right—only to find their accounts had been closed down.

What has happened because of this? It has had the opposite effect of what we had hoped for. Previously, people went through the official channels of remitting money, tracked by AUSTRAC. We had a chance to pick up whether the money was being laundered or going to terrorist activities. The system worked and we caught people doing that. Our official agencies have done a very good job in doing that. But this legislation is forcing this industry underground. We will end up with less transparency, less tracking of the money when it goes overseas and more people dealing in cash. It was said in one of the committee hearings, today, that there are reports of people smuggling several hundred thousand dollars in cash out of Australia—because of the very legislation we thought would fix the problem.

Another example is in my electorate, out in Western Sydney, in what we call the Moorebank intermodal. Again, this was government coming to the rescue to try to reduce pollution in Western Sydney. The thought was, if you take your freight and put it on rail instead of road, you will reduce the pollution. At first blush, there is some truth to this. With rail you have steel on steel and it is more efficient than rubber on road. As far as diesel fuel goes, if you are moving freight for 20 kilometres—what it is from Moorebank to Port Botany—you need half the amount of fuel, than by road, if you put that container on a train and send it via rail.

Federal and state governments are jumping up and down saying how wonderful this is and we will have less carbon pollution, because we will be burning less diesel fuel. But they forgot to have a look at the real pollution in Western Sydney: particulate matter. They forgot to consider how much particulate matter is produced by trucks and trains. The diesel trains we have running around Sydney, on our suburban freight network, spew out 18 times more particulate matter than truck engines. Government thought it was doing a great job at lowering pollution—yes, you use half the fuel but you end up with a nine-fold increase in particulate matter, in Western Sydney, coming from every container that we take off the road and put on rail. At a minimum, it will be a nine-fold increase in particulate-matter-pollution in Western Sydney.

It is particulate matter that the World Health Organisation has deemed a carcinogen. Yet government solutions to reduce pollution are resulting in a nine-fold increase. I could go on with example after example. The fact is that many times, when we come into this place and government thinks it is fixing things, it often only makes the problem worse. That is why this legislation—yes, it does a few things—sends a message that this government is about lowering regulation, is about less red tape, is about freeing the hands of the entrepreneurs who create the wealth in our society. This is a good bill and I commend it to the House.

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