Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

Today was a glorious Canberra summer day. In just over a week it will be March, and autumn will be upon us. The leaves will change colour and start their descent to the ground. The flame tree in the courtyard here at Parliament House will dramatically alter its hue just in time for budget day. And who knows, maybe there will even be an election campaign in the offing. It is easy to get sentimental about autumn. It is a beautiful season. But just as another autumn is almost upon us, I am pleased to be able to stand before the Senate today and relive the autumn of last year in all its glory—because here we are debating the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015.

Introduced in the other place on 18 March 2015, the bill is indeed a reminder of another era. Mr Abbott was Prime Minister, and the biannual repeal days were his signature contribution to microeconomic reform. Back in the old days, when we had the first red tape repeal day, the former Prime Minister himself used to introduce the legislation. The other place would dedicate an entire day to debating the bills. My colleague the shadow minister for finance, Mr Burke, described it as 'a festival, a bonfire of bits of paper and regulations that were going to be destroyed'.

Now look what it has come to. It is such an urgent piece of legislation—which will relieve the businesses and people of Australia of such burdensome regulation—that six months elapsed before the bill was even debated in the other place. That's right, after all the fanfare of repeal day it took the government until September 2015 to bring on the debate in the other place! Now I am sure there are many on the other side who do not mind visiting the Northern Hemisphere from time to time, but I am pretty sure that when the government decided to call this bill the 'Autumn 2015' bill, they were doing so based on the timing of the Australian seasons, not the advent of autumn in North America, Europe or anywhere else.

Once the bill eventually passed the House of Representatives, it was rushed up here to the Senate and immediately used as a backstop in government business on the weekly program week after week after week. The bill was introduced here on 12 October 2015, and on the Thursday before every sitting week we would see it come up on the list—only for it to never see the light of day. The government must have finally run out of legislation, because here it finally is.

We know that there has not been much urgency from the government to move ahead with debate on these bills. We also know the real reason for this. The problem for the government is that, among these bills, there is not much red tape being repealed. There is a lot of fanfare and excitement but, as Mr Burke wittily put it, it is sort of like that moment at the end of The Sound of Music where they announce the Trapp Family Singers and no-one walks in: they announce it two or three more times and then they went off in a chase scene trying to find them. But they had been duped.

Each time the government announces repeal day, they say there is all this regulation that that they will be getting rid of for small business. Red tape will be obliterated. But what do we end up with? Bills that are already obsolete being removed, punctuation changes going through, committees being abolished that already have no members and programs being removed that already have 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 other policies—just a fizzer. It is just a situation where they are committed to going through the motions. So we go through the motions of it, and no-one's heart is in it anymore.

I understand the responsible parliamentary secretary, Mr Hendy, has recently announced that the government will be discontinuing the biannual repeal days that gave rise to legislation such as that which we are debating today. Given the extent to which the government has been shown to have no economic narrative over the last week, with its failure to present a decent critique of Labor's positive plans in the area of negative gearing, for example, along with the Treasurer's embarrassing, rambling performance at the National Press Club, perhaps it might not be too long before these repeal days are revised. Obsolete repeal days might be the best plan they have!

Nearly 12 months have gone by since the bills were initially introduced. We are now debating them. I remind the Senate that one of the previous bills, the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2014) Bill 2014, has still not passed the parliament. It is languishing in the other place. No-one has really noticed, because none of it really matters; but some of that legislation that had all the fanfare back then is still parked in the lower house. No-one talks about it being a double-dissolution trigger because nothing rests on it anyway.

Today we have the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015. It contains seven schedules reflecting amendments in the portfolios of Agriculture, Environment, Health, Indigenous Affairs, Social Services, Treasury and Veterans' Affairs. All of it is reasonable stuff to do, but it is a bit weird to get excited about it. It is delusional to think that this is an answer for small business, that it is something that shows this government is committed to abolishing red tape. The majority of the items do not have any deregulatory savings attached. Two items supply the total deregulatory savings in this bill. There are changes to the Health and Other Services (Compensation) Act 1995 to remove requirements relating to compensation recipients submitting statutory declarations about benefits provided estimated to lead to $41.4 million in deregulatory savings. In addition, changes to make it easier for the public to access aggregate data relating to social security, family assistance, student assistance and paid parental leave legislation that does not disclose information about a particular person are estimated to lead to $3,000 in deregulatory savings. I will repeat that, lest any senator may be concerned that I may have misspoken: just $3,000 in savings.