Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015 and related bills. This brace of bills and amendments delivers on election-day commitments made by the coalition to cut red and green tape, wherever we can, out of the Australian economy. It is worthwhile noting that this legislation adds to the delivery of a long list of achievements for this coalition government, including cutting taxes—the mining and carbon taxes, in particular—and stopping the boats. I notice that the minister who had responsibility for that achievement, Minister Morrison, is now at the table. That has enabled Australia to take a very strong and positive position in dealing with refugees from Syria. The coalition's achievements also include free trade agreements with Japan, Korea and China—unbelievably at this stage still not clearly supported by Bill Shorten and the Labor Party. I hope they will get to the right place in a very short time. These were wonderful achievements by Minister Andrew Robb. There has also been a record infrastructure spend around Australia. All the while, the government has been taking the tough decisions to begin the job of budget repair and pulling the economy back from the precipice.

This is a substantial but far from exhaustive list of achievements that were delivered under Tony Abbott's leadership. It was a prime ministership attacked from day one by so many influential people in our community, many of whom consider themselves to be learned, and many very poisonous pens in the press. It led to a situation where many Australians developed a personal dislike for or vitriol towards the former Prime Minister. It is most unfortunate. It is a very sad thing for him personally to lose the prime ministership, and for his family and his staff and his friends and colleagues in this place. It is a very sad that he was not given the opportunity to defend his record at an election. But the party room took the collective decision that the risk of conceding the next election to the Labor Party was too great—not for the Liberal Party but for Australia. The risk of handing power back to the economic vandals that placed Australia in the precarious position we faced on coming into government was too great. It is certainly a position we have not fully recovered from at this stage. Progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the member for Warringah, Tony Abbott, for leading us back to government, for giving Australia chance before it was too late, for delivering a tough but necessary agenda and for giving his every waking moment to the country he loves, Australia. Tony, you will be judged kindly by history.

As part of our election commitments, when all these things are delivered on, this legislation will take the total deregulatory bonus to $2.45 billion for Australia. That is enormous—$2.45 billion per annum from getting the government out of the road of ordinary Australians at work and play and getting rid of waste. It is a great thing. There is still plenty of work for us to do in this area. There is still plenty of low-hanging fruit. We will continue to deliver these savings to the Australian economy, lifting the burden of red and green tape from ordinary Australians. As a result, I think for the very first time a full audit of government services has revealed a drop in the cost of federal regulation. It is an amazing thing. Everything else goes up and up, but we have been able to wind back the total cost of regulation. Following this repeal day and the full implementation of its content, more than 10,300 legislative instruments will have been axed and we will have removed 2,700 acts of parliament. Unbelievable. Other governments have promised but never really delivered in this area. We have delivered and we will continue to do so.

So what do some of these reforms in the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015 mean to individuals and to businesses? Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, I am sure you have bought a mobile phone at some stage, certainly I have. Fair dinkum, you need to take a day off to go and buy a mobile phone. There is a saying we have in the CFS—I am a CFS volunteer—'hurry-up and wait', and so it applies to buying a mobile phone. You would think it would be so easy to just go and pick the thing out but then you sit down and they say, 'I am sorry, Sir, we are just going through this and we are going through that.' It takes forever. You cannot believe it. It should be so simple. You would think in half an hour you would be able to buy a mobile phone. We will make easier to perform identity checks. It will speed up so, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, that will give you an opportunity to go fishing for the rest of the day after you buy your next mobile phone.

Of course we will have already noticed that we are allowed to use our personal electronic devices on flights. I had always wondered why it was that we could not use electronic devices on aeroplanes. I have never flown a jet liner it must be said but I can fly a light aeroplane and I have never come across a pilot that said it made it a scrap of difference whether or not we are on the phone. I actually thought it was about public etiquette. For those of us that have been to Japan, let me tell you, you rarely, I have to say, see a passenger on a Japanese train that has not got their mobile phone in their hand, furiously texting away. But I tell you what, you never hear one ring and you will never hear them pick up the phone and make a call because it is considered to be such poor etiquette. I had wondered over the years if perhaps the airlines just did not want people shouting on their phones in aeroplanes and upsetting the rest of the people on the flight. Anyway, we can now use our personal electronic devices in flight.

Improvements to the myGov site will save people's precious time. Time is the one thing that we all are given a certain amount of in our lives and wasted time is the worst time of all. Anything that cuts the time we have to waste trying to deal with government departments is a good move so there will be improvements to the myGov website.

Businesses will benefit from improved flexibility for pay-as-you-go payments by allowing monthly payers to actually calculate their contributions on a quarterly basis. This will not make any difference to the total income of the government from these payments; it will just make it simpler and easier for all those thousands of people running small businesses out there to deal with the requirements of government.

We will be removing idiosyncratic regulations applying singularly to the federal interstate registration of B-doubles—hooray say all of my truckies, the truckies that carry the nation. They have been driven absolutely spare by the inconsistent rules across the nation in relation to the transport industry and it costs them millions. This is just one small reform but in this case the changes will deliver more than $8 million worth of savings to the industry. Anything we can do to make their job easier is, in the end, a benefit for all Australians.

The ag sector is a sector I have been closely associated with all my life. We bring a number of livestock products into Australia that are low biosecurity risk. Because they are low-risk, they will be excluded from the onerous scrutiny of APVMA, a very fine organisation. It provides a double benefit in that it frees up the APVMA to do the important things, the things they should be doing. The APVMA will deliver in a more timely manner the services and registration of new chemicals, for instance, that farmers need to run modern and efficient properties. An added benefit will be that it will make it easier for those people importing those products that essentially are low-risk and do not deserve the level of scrutiny they are receiving at the moment. If you keep looking at a product as it is brought into Australia and over a long period of time there are no complications with it then it obviously makes sense to take it off the high level of scrutiny agenda.

Students trying to attend a tertiary education in the city are a very important part of my electorate. I have spoken many times in this place about the difficulties that country students face in trying to deal with a $20,000-difference in the cost of doing a degree by dint of the fact that they have to leave home to attend the institution. For them to juggle the financial commitments of attending those institutions, they often have to juggle jobs, sometimes numerous jobs and inconsistent part-time jobs. So students will be given new access online to be able to change their details for the government benefits they receive. It is a very important reform. As their circumstances change on a day-by-day basis, they can log on and keep the system up to date to make sure they are not infringing the law. It is estimated that this will save $7.8 million.

There will be changes to NAPLAN. NAPLAN will be delivered online, which will save $9.7 million. These last two changes I have just detailed are harvesting the technology dividend. It is so important that we should. We feel sadness throughout our community as we see jobs disappear that have employed people in our communities for all our lives. The perfect example is the local banks. Once you would go in and there would be 10 or 15 people in the branch, scurrying round, all with different jobs to do. Now of course we do pretty much all of our banking outside that building. If the bank's branch still exists, there are two or three people in there. We do not go in to get a roll in cash; we get that out of the hole in the wall outside. When we want to pay bills, we sit down on our computer at home and press the buttons and the bills are paid. I mourn the loss of those jobs but they simply make no sense any more. Just as with the students online and the changes to NAPLAN, that is about government adjusting its services to modern technology and taking advantage of the dividend that modern technologies provide. It is fitting and the right thing to do, and we should always be on that edge, making sure that we get the best performance possible from the federal government and consequently for the community at large.

So many of these individual items embraced in the three repeal day bills up to this time have taken advantage of that dividend. We have looked at old and antiquated legislation—things that simply do not have to be there anymore, sometimes. Governments have said—in fact, I think the previous Labor government said—'We will repeal a bill for every new regulation that comes in.' Unfortunately, they got sidetracked and that never happened. I do not think it was a lack of intent. Government is a very difficult business. It can be overwhelming, and the demands of the day mean you do not get to tidy up the ends, which is why it has been so important that this government has dedicated somebody to that role. It started off, of course, with the member for Kooyong.

So I commend the bills. It is government at work and getting on with the business, and I look forward to the opposition supporting the individual changes required to achieve the overall reduction of red and green tape in the Australian economy.

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