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

I hope that the government simply does better than it did last time. The member for Kooyong needs to understand that we are willing him to succeed in this. We just want him to do a good deal better than he did last time.

The other test that is often applied here is simply the number of regulations. Since the last repeal day I understand that the government has introduced 600 new regulations. Most of those regulations are good things to do. Simply having a regulation is not a measure of whether you have something stifling business. I give the simple example—and this was supported by the Liberals opposite and opposed by the Nationals opposite—of when we deregulated the wheat industry. When we got rid of the AWB monopoly it was a deregulation measure but it involved more regulations on the statute books than had previously been there. So to simply have the number of regulations as the test does not actually mount your policy case for whether you are providing more freewheeling opportunity for business to avoid unnecessary regulation.

That last time the government dealt with this issue they put a number of proposals. We are not arguing that there was not a cost saving to government but we would certainly argue with the merit of the proposals that they had. Last time they claimed savings, more than a quarter—28.3 per cent of the $700 billion—involved the watering down of consumer protections for the Future of Financial Advice reforms and giving a fresh licence for contractors to cut the wages of cleaners through the abolition of the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines. I do not dispute that there were savings there, but they were savings without merit. They were savings that hurt consumers and savings that hurt some of the lowest paid workers in this country.

If we get rid of regulations, is it automatically good? Getting rid of redundant regulations is a reasonable thing to do. We got rid of in the order of 16,000 regulations in the time we were in government. Sometimes, as I have said before, the introduction of additional pieces of regulation is of itself a deregulation measure—and the abolition of the AWB monopoly is a perfect example of where something like that was done. I acknowledged that the National Party opposed it. Almost everybody sitting around you, Minister Joyce, supported us on that one, but, as I have acknowledged already, your decision was to oppose us on that.

We will wait till we see the legislation in full before we make a decision obviously as to which way we are going to vote. Last time it took some time before the full list of what the government had abolished became clear.

Last time, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor was abolished on red tape repeal day; only for the government to later realise that this was something they wanted to put in place; they have since committed to bring it back. So this was a position that existed; there had been bipartisan support for it to exist. On regulation repeal day, they got rid of it. But only shortly after they said: 'Oops! Didn't mean to do that one.'

The government acknowledge that simply getting rid of a regulation is not automatically a good thing. Some things are there for national security purposes. Many things are there for consumer protection purposes. Many issues are there for occupational health and safety. There are a range of regulations that are there for a good purpose. That said, if there are regulations that are redundant or if there are ways of streamlining the rules for business, that is a good thing to do.

Since the last repeal day, the Prime Minister has boasted about savings—and he referred specifically to the issue of carbon pricing—to households. In the interim, though, we had a budget which put a cost onto those same households and which eclipses the figures that the Prime Minister just provided to the parliament. In the same way, in the interim, we had the government propose for small businesses to be saddled with an avalanche of job applications when the government proposed that job seekers were going to have to put out 40 job applications a month. Not one small business thought that that idea from the government made the other proposals they had in red tape reduction worth it. Small business across my electorate and across the country knew quite clearly that, for all the talk of regulation repeal, what the government was putting in front of them was an avalanche of extra paperwork that they did not want.

The government also, in the comments made by the Prime Minister, referred to a number of reforms which have involved putting information onto the internet and providing access to information through various webpages, which are good initiatives. He has referred to the myGov website, which is a good initiative but an initiative that did not begin with the advent of this government. An initiative of people being able to access government services through the myGov website was well and truly set up and well and truly underway under the previous government.

The SmartGate system at airports was an initiative started under the Howard government; advanced fully during the years of the Labor government; and continued under this government. For it to be now announced in a ministerial statement by the Prime Minister of Australia as though it is something new, and part of red tape reduction day, when it has been a process going through Australia for near on a decade, is an absurd claim.

Similarly, I will concede that what they have said about myTax is true; that is theirs, because they have renamed e-tax, which was available under the Labor government, which was progressively being updated and which would have evolved in its next generation to be exactly what myTax is now. But they wanted to be able to claim that they had one new. So, for three different things that they were doing on the internet, they thought: 'Well, we'll at least rename one of them, because then it will be true that myTax is new'. Yes, that one is new, which does roughly something similar to where the e-tax system was already up to and was continuing to evolve.

Labor will work through the legislation when it is introduced, because at the moment all we have is the occasional op-ed from the parliamentary secretary opposite—

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