George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, indeed, Mr Acting Deputy President. I share with you, I am sure, that we will take to our graves the experience of having suffered through that speech.

This is a cognate debate on the Amending Acts 1970 to 1979 Repeal Bill 2014 and the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2014. The work of the first bill is to repeal some 656 obsolete statutes from Commonwealth law. The purpose of the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2014 is to correct errors in a large number of existing bills which it is not the purpose of the bill to repeal.

I want to concentrate on the Amending Acts 1970 to 1979 Repeal Bill, but, before I come back to that, let me say a word about the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2). Senator Collins took the government to task for listing this bill as an item of government business rather than as a non-controversial item of legislation, apparently in ignorance of the fact that the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) was listed as a non-controversial bill at the end of last year, as these bills customarily are. Unfortunately, it was filibustered by the opposition at the time and was not reached. It could have been dealt with in the orthodox way as a non-controversial bill in 2014, but because of filibustering by the Australian Labor Party that was not able to be done. So it is being dealt with cognately with the Amending Acts 1970 to 1979 Repeal Bill 2014. The point is that not one moment of extra parliamentary time in government business is being taken to deal with the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2), which, had the Labor Party showed a spirit of cooperation, would have been through the parliament as a non-controversial bill last year.

Let me turn, then, to the Amending Acts 1970 to 1979 Repeal Bill. This is the next tranche in the government's deregulation agenda, much mocked by Senator Jacinta Collins. If I may say so, we saw in Senator Collins's inelegant speech a classic example of the differences between those who sit on my side of the chamber and those who sit opposite, because, you see, those who sit opposite—those of the Australian Labor Party, those inheritors of the socialist tradition of the 19th century, now a pale, wan social democratic point of view—love laws. They love regulation. They live for green tape and red tape. They just worship at the altar of government. The more power government has over the lives of everyday people, the happier they are. The more families, businesspeople and community organisations are tied hand and foot by red tape and regulation, the happier the Australian Labor Party are. It cannot be said often enough that the big difference—the eternal difference—between the Labor Party and us in the Liberal-National Party, on this side of the chamber, is that we want to set people free and the Labor Party want to tie them in knots, in regulations, in red tape, in green tape, in beige tape, in statutory instruments and in every manner of interfering, pettifogging regulation and legislation that they can possibly imagine. So determined are the Australian Labor Party to cling onto this forest—this thick undergrowth—of laws that they even object to getting rid of obsolete laws. They even object to getting rid of laws that have no practical operation any longer.

As I said, this is the latest instalment of the Abbott government's deregulatory agenda, led in the first instance by my friend the member for Kooyong, now the Assistant Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg. Can I tell you what we have achieved already, before this bill is even dealt with. As of 22 October 2014, on the first two instalments of the repeal of obsolete legislation, we had repealed 1,803 acts that were obsolete, that had cluttered the statute book since 1901, when this parliament first convened and that both sides of politics had neglected to get rid of. We had repealed 10,157 legislative instruments—again, delegated legislation or subordinate legislation that was obsolete but nevertheless provided a compliance hazard for citizens and for businesses. In total, all told, as of 22 October last year, we had repealed 57,200 pages of obsolete legislation. So devoted is the Labor Party to tying the Australian people and the Australian economy up in unnecessary, burdensome and meddlesome laws and regulations that they objected to us doing that, even though not one of those bills and statutory instruments had any effect whatsoever.

Treasury has estimated that the compliance cost to business, lifted from the shoulders of business by the repeal days of last year, is in excess of $2 billion—in excess of $2 billion of compliance costs wasted by businesses in particular that had to do their due diligence to ensure that they were not in fact affected by any of this obsolete legislation. That is $2 billion of money wasted.

I know that to the Australian Labor Party that wastes tens of hundreds of billions of dollars as a matter of routine $2 billion might not sound like very much. But we on our side of the chamber think that $2 billion is a lot of money. You can do a lot of good things with $2 billion. Businesses would rather have that $2 billion in their profit margin than as an outlay because they had that compliance burden arising from obsolete legislation.