Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would hate to call the minister out. In relation to this bill, whenever you look at the cost-benefit analysis the government goes through in relation to the cost of new legislation, once again we find evidence of mendacious activity from the government. It is not clear exactly what cost this would be in terms of the new regulator and it is not clear where the money is coming from. In relation to what we can tell, we have a stated figure that the changes will be accompanied by spending of around $98.2 million over the next five years. I want to note that this expenditure is supposedly offset by cuts of $1 billion overall to the R&D tax incentive that do not appear to have been appropriately modelled and have certainly never been publicly clarified or justified. So, again, whenever we see new legislation presented with heavy-handed regulation, overregulation, we do not really even have an understanding of how much it will cost, or a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Why is a rigorous cost-benefit analysis important in relation to new legislation? There is a good 280 billion reasons why a cost-benefit analysis matters in terms of public debt, net debt, and perhaps some $300 billion of reasons very shortly in terms of gross debt, why we need cost-benefit analysis, why we need to look at what is the actual benefit of this new regulator and legislation versus the cost that it will have to government.

When you consider the response of stakeholders, including small to medium enterprises, industry associations and indeed all of the major industry sectors, you can see that there is a grave level of concern about the way this bill would operate. Ideas which could be seen to be reasonable, and indeed the reduction of the capex of $500 million or more for AIP projects, could be seen to be a good thing. However, I want to note the dissenting report by coalition senators, who raise an excellent argument in relation to the proposed reduction of capex—that is, that there could be a range of problems. In particular, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA provided a calculation that said that the changes would mean that the share of affected projects would rise from six per cent to around 26.2 per cent. That is by anybody's benchmark a dramatic increase. That sort of dramatic increase is something that ought to be considered quite carefully before we proceed with something like this and would have a lot of effects in terms of cost and assessments and the involvement of government in so many other projects. It is something which again does not appear to be desirable.

While the coalition is certainly supportive of the scheme introduced by the Howard government in 2001, the core purpose—to give Australian firms increased opportunity to secure work on major local projects—is a worthy one. When you look at the actual provisions of this bill, however, and you examine what the government is proposing, it has not been demonstrated, and it is not obvious, how this particular bill—with its Orwellian title, the Australian Jobs Bill—will in fact achieve that objective. And I take with grave concern the concerns of industry and other serious players in this sector suggesting that, in many ways, the increased regulatory burden and the new regulator may indeed achieve much of the opposite or add to the sovereign risk of doing business in Australia.

So, with those features in the forefront of our minds, I would advocate opposing this bill. I know the coalition is opposing this bill. We are looking for something more meaningful from the government than a new, heavy-handed regulator and a series of changes which are uncosted and really have no substantive backing from the sector involved.

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