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

I congratulate the member for Oxley for moving this motion. The franchise sector is incredibly important to our economy. Every one of us in this House would have many in their own electorates that do a remarkable job, employ people and provide good services to our community, and they deserve our absolute consideration in this place.

Before I go on, though, I would like to refer to the contribution by the member for Forde. We seem to have over and over again in this place at the moment the rather untrue statement about the level of regulation under Labor compared to Liberal. It has been repeated again today, and I would like to repeat again what I said in the House: under the last two years of the Howard government, there was more regulation by far than there was under the first two years of the Labor government. We did introduce 21,000 regulations and legislative instruments, including nearly 7½ thousand which were air safety directives or relating to tariff concessions, which business wanted—in most cases relating to just one instance—but we also repealed 16,000. Sixteen thousand went out during our time. Under the Howard years, they came in at a far greater rate than they did under us. So a little bit of truthfulness—where is Sharman Stone when you need her, quite frankly!—in this area would come in handy.

I also want to take him up on the statement he made about Labor's response to the Wein review when it came down on 30 April. He flippantly said, 'Oh, five months later they still hadn't done anything.' I think that, again, they might just want to think about the truthfulness of these statements and what they are trying to get across. The 30th of April was a couple of weeks before the budget, just for a start. What we did was that we managed very quickly to issue a consultation paper, in spite of the fact that it was 30 April. We ran a consultation from 17 June to 9 July 2013 to better understand the practical impacts of accepting the Wein recommendations. Then on 24 July we announced that we had already developed a regulatory impact statement and we would be legislating in August. Of course parliament did not return and an election was called.

Again, the use of a small amount of truth to create a rather large untruth is something that the people on the other side of parliament seem to be very good at. As I said in the last speech, I wonder what they say to their children about that kind of behaviour. 'Do as I say and not as I do. We can make this stuff up because we are the government.' Perhaps they say that, I don't know, but I would urge them to try to behave themselves the way they would expect decent people in their broader community to behave—and this is not the way of it.

The Wein review was incredibly important. It came at the end of a lengthy process of consultation with franchisees and it made a number of recommendations which have been welcomed by the sector. The Minister for Small Business, Bruce Billson, said that early in 2014 the government would implement these recommendations. Now we hear from the member for Eden-Monaro that that is actually not right. They are not going to do anything. They value the sector but they are not going to rush. They are going to do another review—they are going to review again. They are going to have another look on top of the one that was already done, which had bipartisan support prior to the election and after the election.

Quite frankly, if they want to create certainty for the franchise sector, perhaps the thing to do as government is stop changing their mind. They supported it during the review process. It was bipartisan. I sat on the corporations committee that did the inquiry into this. Through all the consultation process there was bipartisan agreement. An election was held. The Minister for Small Business confirmed that he was committed to it, promised to do it, said that he would do it early in 2014. And now we are hearing that that is actually not the case. If someone on the other side can tell me how that creates certainty for the franchise sector, I think that would be really interesting. It might be helpful to me to hear how changing your mind so quickly provides certainty for the sector.

These changes are changes that the sector wants. They have been consulted extensively. They have made contributions on the practicality. They have been promised action. Quite frankly, it is about time this government delivered on its promise to this all-important sector.

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