Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am getting very sentimental about what red-tape repeal day used to be. Back in the old days, when we had the first red-tape repeal day, it was introduced here by the Prime Minister. The entire day was dedicated to the bills. It was a festival—a bonfire of bits of paper and regulations that were going to be destroyed. Now look what it has come to. It used to be introduced by the Prime Minister; now it gets introduced by the parliamentary secretary. And instead of it being the previous parliamentary secretary, the member for Kooyong, who used this issue to find his way all the way to the front row of the government benches, it is now the member for Pearce who gets to introduce it, on 18 March, and nearly six months later we decide it is time to have the second speech on red-tape repeal day. The problem has been that, amongst these bills, there is actually not much red tape being repealed. There is lots of fanfare, there is lots of excitement, but it is sort of like that moment at the end of The Sound of Music where they announce the Von Trapp Family Singers and no-one walks in. They announce it two or three more times, and then they go off in a chase scene trying to find them.

Each time the fanfare is that there is all this regulation that they will be getting rid of for small business—sometimes the red tape is going to a bonfire; sometimes it is going to go through a shredder. And what do we end up with? Bills that are already obsolete being removed; punctuation changes going through; committees being abolished that already had no members; programs being removed that already had no funds. That is what is left. That is why red-tape repeal day has gone from being something that the government would get front-page stories on—there would be a big build-up and it would be part of their economic narrative—to being like so many of their policies, just a fizzer, and it is just a situation where they are committed to go through the motions, so we go through the motions of it, but no-one's heart is in it anymore.

Nearly six months have gone by since the bills were initially introduced. We are now debating them. One of the previous bills, the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2014) Bill 2014, still has not passed the parliament. It is still bouncing back and forth between the houses. No-one has really noticed, because none of it really mattered, but some of that legislation that had all the fanfare back then is still bouncing back and forth between the houses. No-one talks about it being a double dissolution trigger because nothing rests on it anyway.

Today we have got three of them: the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015, the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015, and the Statute Law Bill (No.2) 2015. They largely contain the removal of spent and redundant pieces of legislation, the repeal of redundant provisions within acts and fixes to punctuation and spelling and modernising of language in legislation. All of it is reasonable stuff to do, but it is a bit weird to get excited about it. It is a bit weird to think that this is an answer for small business, that this is something that shows this is a government committed to abolishing red tape.

In the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2015, we see a continuation of a series of bills where the parliament has witnessed the war on punctuation—removing hyphens, changing 'facsimile' to 'fax', and other spelling, grammar and cross-referencing matters that could not wait a day longer. To date, the government has claimed red-tape savings across the three statute law revision bills of $870,000 as part of the red-tape repeal days. On current count, the achievement of these bills has been to remove 45 hyphens, two commas and one inverted comma and to change two full stops to semicolons, one semicolon to a full stop and to insert one full stop, one colon, one hyphen and one comma.

They are meant to be some of the key things in the removal of red tape by this government. I have to say with the removal of the 45 hyphens that at least it is big number, and I do think there was something happening there with the inverted comma. But, really, the explanatory memorandum on this one, the Statute Law Revision Bill No. 2, says it all:

None of the corrections makes any change to the substance of the law.

It is there in black and white in the explanatory memorandum for the bill itself. That is followed by the statement:

This Bill will have no financial impact.

So the explanatory memorandum says:

None of the corrections makes any change to the substance of the law.

This Bill will have no financial impact.

Remember the excitement when this first started. Remember the Prime Minister standing there telling us how committed this government was to removing red tape—and this is what we get. Six months later they bring it back on and the parliamentary secretary responsible is nowhere to be seen and the minister who used to be in charge of this is seen fleeing from the chamber the moment this issue comes on.

The bill also includes correction of cross-referencing and fixing grammar, such as changing 'an' to 'a' in the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Code Act 1994; changing 'object' to 'objects' in the Industrial Chemicals (Notification and Assessment) Act 1989; removing a stray inverted comma in the Federal Circuit Court of Australia Act; changing 'if' to 'of' in the Surveillance Devices Act 2004; modernising language—here is a good one—and replacing terms like 'reference base' with 'index reference period' in 31 different acts in relation to indexation provisions; the repeal of redundant provisions in two pieces of legislation that have ceased to have effect anyway; and repealing six acts that have past their date of effect. So the acts already said that they would expire on a particular date and that date has gone. So we are repealing them now even though they already do not matter.

How on earth is this relevant to an anti-red tape agenda? As a cleaning-up exercise, maybe—but who actually cares? Making sure that spelling, grammar and cross-referencing in legislation is all up to date is a necessary task, but it is a routine job. It is nothing to get excited about. A noteworthy action in this bill is that there is the removal of gender specific language in the Parliamentary Presiding Officers Act and the Public Works Committee Act. They have replaced 'chairman of committee' with 'chair of committees.' There is $100,000 in deregulatory savings attached to this bill. I am not entirely sure how to quantify the value of a comma, but that is the total that we are told.

Then we get to the next one, the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015. This bill repeals 870 acts from 1980 to 1989. So you might think, 'That's 870 acts gone; that is a whole lot of regulation gone.' It is the third bill in a series of bills that have dealt with things like relating to state navies and the registration of mules and bullocks for military purposes. The explanatory memorandum to this bill states again:

In all cases, the repeal of the Acts will not substantially alter existing arrangements or make any change to the substance of the law.

There are repeals of many amending acts. These are ones where the amending act goes through, the amendments have occurred and the amending act automatically ceases to have effect—but we have come back to repeal it anyway. There are also repeals of amending acts where the principal act itself was repealed some years ago. So they have gone back and said, 'Oh, well, just for the hell of it, even though there is no principal act and there hasn't been for years, let's repeal all the amending acts so that we can claim that we have repealed more legislation,' even though none of it for years has made a difference to anyone at all.

Examples of this include the Delivered Meals Subsidy Amendment Act 1980, which made amendments to the Delivered Meals Subsidy Act 1970. This is, I presume, Gordon government legislation which was then amended by the Fraser government. The amendment was in relation to making changes to the subsidy that could be paid to an approved organisation providing meal services. The main act was repealed in 2009. So this has no effect at all, but it is there added to the total. If you wanted to say, 'Repealing the main act might have made a difference,' yes, maybe that is true, but that happened in 2009 under Labor. The only part of that that made any difference was what was repealed in 2009. We are now repealing amendments to an act that has already gone.

The National Debt Sinking Fund Amendment Act 1989 amended the National Debt Sinking Fund Act 1966. The main act was repealed by another act in 1994. So it was repealed in the Keating government and ceased to have effect in 1995—so, again, another completely inconsequential amendment. If getting rid of the principal acts mattered, they could run that argument, but both of them happened under Labor. The big achievement of the Abbott government on red tape repeal day is that they are obliterating legislation that already does not matter and has not mattered for more than a decade. For some, there have been four of five changes of government in the interim, during which time no-one on earth has been troubled by these acts. Few people on the planet have known they existed. Yet we are meant to get excited with the fanfare of red tape repeal day, that somewhere in this nation there will be a small business operator looking back over their ledger and saying, 'Gee, I'm really glad the National Debt Sinking Fund Amendment Act 1989 is one that I don't have to check anymore'—because that was what must have been causing trouble for red tape and paperwork in that small business. They are claiming $600,000 in deregulatory savings with this one.

What we are dealing with today, rather than hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in deregulatory savings, is less than two per cent of the total deregulatory savings that the government would want to claim. Serious deregulation can be done. As agriculture minister I was responsible for the wheat industry—and the Libs supported me; the Nats did not—where you were actually getting rid of regulation in a real way.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am having fun, Mr Speaker.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is red tape repeal day; it is meant to be important.

Debate interrupted.