Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to my colleague the Parliamentary Secretary for an absolutely compelling case as to why the parliament should support this bill. There is nothing worse than consequential provisions that kick in before the consequence to which they relate has actually been achieved. The bill has identified a changeover date when a number of Commonwealth laws dealing with the tax system, the ANL Act, the Bank Integration Act, the Corporations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act, Financial Transaction Reports Corporations Act, the Defence Service Home Act, Olympic Insignia Protection Act, Wine Australia Corporation Act and the Qantas Sale Act. There is no point in having all of those provisions activated prior to the national registration system actually commencing. We were alerted to this issue and had some good discussions with the responsible minister to not impede the passage of the legislation through both houses of parliament with the understanding that this amending provision would be coming through. The coalition is very supportive of this bill. It tidies up a technicality that needs to be tidied up so there is synchronicity with the changeover—that the changeover date sees the national business name system activated and then all of these other changes are brought into effect to coincide with that date. This whole idea about national business names registration is something the coalition supports. When we were talking about the substantive bill I pointed to the work that was instigated back in 2006-07 by the then coalition government and it is good to see that things are being moved along by the current government.

I will briefly touch on a couple of other points I raised in my contribution. I would put this under the watching brief that the coalition has on the implementation of the national business names system. There were a couple of issues that we know—

Mr Husic interjecting—

Thank you. Government Whip?

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