Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I am going to take that interjection, because I am going to say to the member interjecting when he says 'Get on with it' that we probably should have said that to the government a year ago when it put this bill to the parliament, which everyone supported, that it could have gone through in 10 minutes and then they sat on it for a year.

The member for Longman clearly got out his speech from a year ago as well. When he says it only took six months—how pleased Ian from Longman was that it only took six months from the first time he mentioned it to Josh and Wyatt—that was six months before May last year. It has now been 18 months. This is a bill which could have been passed anytime in that 12 months. This is a bill they could have added to their rather fictitious total of red tape reduction last year. This is a bill which could have actually saved the work of small businesses last year because it had the support of both sides of parliament.

I suspect that it is in the House today because the government does not actually have much other legislation. If it did, it would probably still be sitting on the table. You look at what we are discussing in the parliament today—and I am pleased that the 100th anniversary ministerial statement is being debated in this House. But traditionally, because of the amount of work this House does, in past parliaments most of the legislation that we are debating today would have been in the Federation Chamber. This one certainly would have been because it has the support of both sides and is non-controversial, so it would have gone through in the second chamber and been handled in a very short period of time.

I think the member for Longman also spent most of his speech talking about the work that was done by Labor in 2009. He spent about two or three minutes talking about what this bill is actually about. That is not surprising because that is where the bulk of the work was done. In the normal course of business, by the way, the government of Australia deals with the consequences of our history and having six states and regulatory regimes that build up in each state and do not match. At some point a competent federal government finds a way to work with the states and amalgamate all those different regimes and put them together in one federal act, and that is what we did—incredibly difficult work. Not a song a dance, not a bonfire red tape repeal day when we did it; we just did it back in 2009. That is when the work was done.

With any extremely complex piece of regulation and with so many different regimes—in fact, there were 70 pieces of legislation, 23 different state and territory registers prior to 2009—when you deal with red tape regulatory reduction there will be things that you did not think of that come up. It is the normal work of government every day to gradually, bit by bit, work those things through, to consult with industry and bring them to this House, and hopefully put them to the House for debate not just sit on them for 12 months. That is what this bill does. It deals with two particular unintended consequences which have caused a certain amount of pain for small business. It is really good to see them finally—a year and a half, not six months but 18 months after first raised with Wyatt and Josh by Ian in Longman—get to this House where they will no doubt go through quite quickly now that the government has decided to act on it and not just talk about it.

There are two aspects to this bill that are the guts of it. One is that at the moment there are two timeframes for registration of interests. One is for motor vehicles and a number of other assets that are leased for 90 days or more or for 12 months or more. This just removes the 90 days. The government did consult well on this. They put out three different options including leave it as it is, making other changes, or this option. This was the one which received the most industry support and appears to be the simplest and we support it. The consultation work in that six-month period was quite good and the outcomes are good. What is not good is that they then sat on those good outcomes for 12 months and left business in the position that they are now railing against—business was in this terrible position. In the last 12 months there was an answer. They could have brought it forward at any moment and they did not.

The second one is really quite interesting. I have hired a Wacker Packer myself recently. Apparently it turns out that a Wacker Packer is a motor vehicle—

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