Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

That is very good. He knows the extent to which they were frightened the Australian government was going to come in and take their stock for military purposes. It also repealed the Judiciary Act 1914 that made the High Court of Australia a Colonial Court of Admiralty, notwithstanding that Colonial Courts of Admiralty had ceased to exist in 1988.

Somehow getting rid of these laws that were redundant, meaningless and had no impact on anyone—so there was no problem getting rid of them; we did not oppose it—adds up to $210,000 worth of savings. I do not know how. I do not know how those numbers get put together, but it makes more sense than when they established $350,000 worth of savings for the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 1). This was the bill that removed hyphens and commas. The purpose of that bill was to remove one comma in the Patents Act and 11 hyphens in various Commonwealth statutes. Where it said 'e-mail' they decided to remove the hyphen and just make it 'email'—obviously on the technical understanding of email, probably from the Attorney-General—and where it said 'facsimile' or 'facsimile transmission' they changed it to 'fax' in 16 pieces of legislation. Somehow this is $350,000 worth of savings. In the way the government is calculating the savings on these bills, when you add it up that would amount to in the order of $10,000 per comma. There is a fair bit of hype going on in the total dollar figures of the savings to business and consumers through these bills.

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