Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg, has moved on to greener pastures, but this time last year he was the humble—well, he was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Australia's red-tape tsar. Describing the origins of his zeal for cutting red tape, Mr Frydenberg told The Australian Financial Review about the time his wife went to Centrelink to apply for paid parental leave. I thought to myself: 'She went to Centrelink to apply for paid parental leave? Does that make them double dippers or rorters, to use the words of the member for Cook? I guess it does.' But he was not making the point that he would fall into the category of double dipper or rorter. Rather, he was making the point that he was beside himself over the paperwork his family had to deal with in signing up for government paid parental leave alongside employer based paid parental leave—and he committed himself on the spot to doing something about it.

You have to give him credit: the member for Kooyong does not do things by half. He certainly found a solution to that red-tape problem at Centrelink. The government's solution is apparently to change the scheme so that, in future, families who want to claim the payment that his family claimed would not be entitled to do so—80,000 new mums booted off the Paid Parental Leave scheme. That will save them having to fill out the sorts of forms the member for Kooyong's family had to—by completely cutting off their access to parental leave. It is an ingenious solution from the former red-tape tsar and you can see why, with ideas like that, the government has promoted him.

At the heart of this story is the problem with the Abbott government's—now Turnbull government—approach to so-called red tape repeal. Most of the time the changes they make in bills like this are completely pointless. The member for Watson has referred to it as the 'war on punctuation'; around my office this part of the government's agenda is referred to as the 'Comma Commandos'.

With the government putting forward so many examples of ridiculous changes and pointless updates, it is hard to pick a favourite. After all, this is a bill that goes to the trouble of changing 'if' to 'of' in the Surveillance Devices Act 2004; and replaces the gendered 'Chairman of Committees' with the more politically correct 'Chair of Committees' in the Parliamentary Presiding Officers Act 1965 and the Public Works Committee Act 1969. It is somewhat ironic give that I have heard members of this government proudly say that the term 'chairman' should continue to be used rather than 'chair' within their internal processes. I digress.

I could not go past the government's brave and important decision to replace the term 'reference base' with 'index reference period' in 31 acts discussing indexation provisions. That is going to be a huge gain for Australia. You can already imagine the other OECD countries and the G20 countries, sitting around saying,' Well, if we want to follow Australia's economic lead, what we need to do is change reference base to index reference period in our acts too.'

Yet the government is trumpeting these so-called red tape reductions. Mostly, this is what it is doing: removing commas, replacing prepositions, and updating words like 'fax' to 'email'. It is mostly harmless stuff, but certainly nothing deserving the kind of fanfare the government gives it. When we were in office, Labor removed 16,000 redundant acts, regulations and legislative instruments but we did not declare war on bad punctuation. Fixing typos is simply part of the background work of government. Red tape repeal day is like having a day where you come to the office, have a cup of tea and get to work.

Occasionally, when the government gets its red tape scissors out, it actually does real harm. There is no better example than the Abbott-Turnbull governments' attempts over the past year to scrap the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission under the guise of cutting red tape.

Our charities and not-for-profits are the backbone of Australia's community life. Every day, across Australia, hundreds of thousands of organisations deliver services to the sick and elderly, help make our environment cleaner, contribute funds for critical research, run programs to keep at-risk kids out of the justice system and make sure that our social fabric is that little bit stronger. Charities are vital for our community and, if their contribution was measured in GDP, our GDP would be considerably higher than it is today. As it is, the measured economic activity of charities is around five per cent of total GDP and turns over about $1 billion a year.

The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission exists so that those charities can spend less time filling in paperwork and more time helping Australians. Independent research suggests the commission saves charities around $120 million a year in compliance costs. That is $120 million more that can be spent in communities that really need the help. As well as accrediting charities so that they can qualify for tax-deductible gift recipient status, the commission also helps not-for-profits understand and meet their governance obligations through information, advice and guidance.

When it cuts red tape for charities, the charities commission protects Australians from scammers. Before we established the commission, Australians had no way of finding out whether a charity was dodgy or legit; whether somebody who came to your door asking money was a real charity or a scammer. Now you can jump onto www.acnc.gov.au and check them out in an instant. The charities commission is proactive when it comes to dealing with scammers. In 2014, it deregistered several charities across Australia after investigations showed their benevolent work was a sham.

Earlier this year we celebrated with a birthday cake at the opposition end of the House of Reps—the fourth birthday since the establishment of the charities commission. This was an event to which all members of parliament were invited, but I was sad not to see a single one of my coalition colleagues. It was disappointing that even the member for Dunkley, the great bipartisan member that he is, was not able to be there to support the work of the charities commission.

See this speech in context