Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to state that the coalition will be supporting this bill. The bill makes minor amendments across 85 Commonwealth acts. These types of bills come before parliament from time to time. Indeed, the former coalition government introduced a very similar bill in 2021 which lapsed at the end of the 46th Parliament.

There are six schedules in this bill. Schedule 1 aims to reduce the number of provisions that require the use of forms that are prescribed by regulation. By way of example, one of the items in the schedule will see an amendment to the Health Insurance Act 1974 to remove the words 'prescribed form' and substitute the words 'approved form'. The amendments in schedule 1 amend provisions to replace the forms prescribed by regulation with other approaches such as empowering regulations to directly mandate the requirements themselves and empowering ministers and other senior decision-makers to approve forms via notifiable instruments, which is consistent with the view of the Attorney-General's Department that prescribed or approved forms should appear on the federal register of legislation. This is in keeping with modern drafting practices.

The main purpose of schedule 2 is to update language related to person with disability to focus on the person rather than the disability across numerous pieces of Commonwealth legislation. These updates do not change the meaning of 'relevant provisions'. The updates give effect to the recommendations made by Economic Justice Australia in its August 2022 research report: Handicapped; use of outdated terminology in social security law and social policy.

Schedule 3 will amend Commonwealth acts that refer to Northern Territory acts to reflect changes the Northern Territory made to citing its acts. This again will change neither the purpose nor the intent of the legislation. Schedules 4 to 6 make amendments to remove technical errors across numerous pieces of legislation and release obsolete acts or spent and obsolete provisions of acts. As we know, from time to time drafting errors occur or obsolete provisions of acts do not get repealed when they are replaced, and provisions to clean up those errors are routine. The amendments in schedules 4 to 6 enhance readability, facilitate interpretation and administration and promote consistency across the Commonwealth statute book. The changes in this bill are minor and technical, do not impact the intent of any statute and will not change the meaning of the relevant legislation except to the extent they reduce the reliance on forms prescribed in legislation. I commend the bill to the Senate.