Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

They're right next door to each other, selling food and selling alcohol—it's tourism and hospitality—and they're not? If simple questions can't get an answer out of the department, can't get an answer out of the Fair Work Commission and can't get an answer out of the minister then how are businesses supposed to go through these 250 pages of legislation and the hundreds of pages in the explanatory memorandum to understand it? The answer is, obviously, that they can't, so they probably need a little bit of help with this new industrial relations regime. They will probably need to get some IR consultants in and, of course, Senator Cash has prosecuted the case on the extraordinary failure of due diligence by this government on their own regulatory impact statement—a regulatory impact statement that allocates $175 as an approximate cost per hour of bargaining.

I was sitting in the inquiry, as I said, when Senator Cash was asking these questions. I thought, quickly, 'How can I find out what the real cost of some advice of this sort would be?' and, as many of us do, I've got a mate who is a lawyer in the industrial relations area. So I sent him a quick text message and said, 'What's it cost to get a non-legal IR representative to give you some advice in this space?'