Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We hear a lot in this House about red tape. We hear a lot about the need to reduce it. We remember the infamous red tape repeal days—some of the best hits repealing redundant amendment acts that had no financial impact; taking the hyphen out of email across legislation; and removing a couple of commas and full stops here and there. When you talk about red tape reduction, you cannot just say it; you need to follow through.

The government would have us believe the billions of dollars in savings appeared almost overnight as a result of these acts. This is all talk and no action just like the rest of the Abbott-Turnbull government's agenda. Today, in contrast, I would like to point to some real-world examples. The Corporations Amendment (Crowd-sourced Funding) Bill is currently before the House. Labor supports the intention of the bill, yet what we do not support is the onerous red tape the government is intent on ramming through. I look, for example, at the headline from StartupSmart, which reads: 'Labor moves to amend government's "dead duck" equity crowdfunding bill by removing "onerous red tape" for startups'.

Restricting access only to incorporated entities excludes the vast majority of small businesses. This government should listen to the small business community. CrowdfundUP commented that the legislation was riddled with, 'undue compliance costs, administration costs and regulatory burdens'. BDO Australia said the red tape contained would be 'a significant deterrent'. VentureCrowd's Tim Heasley said it was a dead duck and would make start-ups jump through hoops.

You cannot just talk about making life easier for small business. You cannot talk the buzz words of being agile and having innovation at heart, and just throw those words around and leave it to the market to fix it. Instead of an ideological war dressed up as regulatory reform, Labor's approach to small business will be grounded in practical measures to help small business owners, operators, employees and those seeking to become those. The member for Chifley's amendments to the crowdfunding bill are testament to this approach. Look what happened, for example, to single touch payroll. This was supposed to be a measure of red-tape reduction, but have a look at the reality. The headline from 21 July 2015, authored by Stuart Norman, the Chief Executive of the Association of Accounting Technicians Australia, reads:

The rollout of single-touch payroll treats businesses with contempt

The article continues:

To use electronic payments such as ‘Single Touch Payroll’ every business will need access to the internet and will more than likely require accounting or payroll software that links to their bank accounts to make ‘real time’ payments.

Some small businesses are pretty much ready for a system such as ‘Single Touch Payroll’ to be rolled out …

But, at the moment, many will not be ready because their internet access is so slow. Enter the then communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull:

The Communications Minister would have us believe that the rollout of the NBN is going swimmingly and that in this country we have no issues with getting internet access at reasonable speeds. Now, this doesn’t even pass the bulldust test as people try and use the internet for their business daily and many know that it’s not up to scratch.

Just like the absence of tax policy from this government, there is lots of talk and little action. The ATO has been lumped with sorting out this mess, and apparently the next time we will hear about it will be in 2017.

Also take, for example, issues with the myGov and myTax portals. Then Parliamentary Secretary Porter said:

Implementing additional functionality for myGov users to allow customers to update their details in one place using the myGov Tell Us Once Service to obtain secure and convenient access to online services with a single account and one set of credentials.

There is only one problem: it does not work. On 11 August last year a headline in The Sydney Morning Heraldread: '"They're in denial": MyGov users vent anger'. The article continues:

The Commonwealth government is "in denial" over the performance of its online service portals, with MyGov coming in for savage criticisms from frustrated users of the system.

And how about the red tape and duplication stemming from the ministerial merry-go-round in this area? First we had the member for Kooyong, then the member for Pearce and now it is the member for Eden-Monaro. The amount of red tape spent just changing the headers on websites and stationery must be enormous even in itself. But do not worry. The member for Eden-Monaro says: do not worry; red tape is not an issue anymore. The problem is, even according to ACCI's own 2015 report, 73 per cent of small businesses said the regulatory burden had increased in the previous 12 months, on this government's watch.