Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I beg your pardon, Mr Deputy Speaker. They are indeed the barnacles on the hull of small business and of families. I do my best when I am travelling around an electorate that is not as big as the member for Durack's electorate but one which is, in the Tasmanian context, a large electorate; I try to listen to the small businesses and families that make up that electorate. The small businesses owners, and the employees within those small businesses, are not usually members of unions. That is perhaps one of the reasons why those opposite take so little interest in genuine attempts by this side of government to improve and remove the red tape that is literally suffocating small businesses all around Australia. The contribution from six years of Labor was 21,000 new regulations. It was going to be one in, one out; but 21,000 new pieces of red tape and regulation were introduced during the six years of the previous government.

Small business is indeed in our DNA. A local businessman said to me recently he is not sure that the community fundraising event he has been involved with for nearly 20 years will continue any longer. The event's organisers, all volunteers, have been struggling for several years with the increasing burden of red tape and mountains of applications and forms they now face to get this community event off the ground. Committee members have just about run out of time and energy for the paperwork. It will be red tape that sees many successful community events shut down.

One of my staffers was telling me recently about her 91-year-old father who happily and healthily lives on his own—except for the growing mountain of paperwork that faces him every time he attempts to seek out services to make his life a little easier. It is government getting involved with people's lives. On this side of the House, we want to get out of government; we want to be a small government. A hospital visit, for example, for a minor procedure required 20 or 30 pages of forms to fill out. A change to his Veterans' Affairs pension required 20 or 30 pages of questions to be answered, even though he had answered the questions before on a number of occasions.

We have all heard stories of regulations gone crazy so that we sometimes feel that we are being strangled by paperwork. That is why it is a wonderful thing that the government is doing for Australians with the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2014) Bill 2014. This is the second such day, which we have promised will be twice-yearly events in parliament focused solely on reducing the compliance burden on individuals, businesses and the not-for-profit sector. I want to acknowledge the work done by all the federal government ministers in bringing to fruition this bill, which will amend and repeal legislation across nine portfolio areas, and the work done by parliamentary secretary Frydenberg to bring this all together. It is a work in progress, because we will not stop until duplication and unnecessary legislation is minimised.

The government has announced more than 400 new measures to cut red tape across the board, from environment to education, health to human services, and Treasury to trade. We are honouring a promise to the Australian people made at the time of last year's election when we said we would cut red tape costs by $1 billion. I am pleased to stand here today and say that the repeal measures thus far will total over $2.1 billion net in compliance costs.

Today, in the second repeal day so far, the government introduces legislation to repeal nearly 1,000 pieces of legislation and regulations and 7,210 pages on the statute books. That is on top of the nearly 10,000 unnecessary or counterproductive regulations and 1,000 redundant acts of parliament that were removed on the government's first red tape repeal day in March this year.

Some of the key reforms from this bill, which will directly benefit the constituents of my electorate of Lyons in Tasmania, include those to do with small business and also the aged-care sector. An estimated 447,000 small businesses nationally will benefit from a reduced tax compliance burden with administrative changes to GST and PAYG reporting. Businesses with no GST payable will no longer be required to lodge a BAS statement. These measures will save small business an estimated $67 million in red tape, which small business operators in Lyons will applaud. I look forward to hosting the Minister for Small Business Mr Billson in a few weeks on the east coast of Tasmania. I know the small business people in that part of my electorate are indeed looking forward to the minister's visit.

Aged-care providers will no longer be required to notify the Department of Social Services—and I note the minister is in the chamber—of key personnel changes unless changes materially affect the provider's suitability to provide care.

Close to my heart are reforms to both the higher education sector and the agricultural sector. Universities are being saved $2.1 million in compliance costs by not being required to complete the Sustainable Research Excellence—SRE—staff hours survey to measure how university researchers balance their time between research and other activities over a two-week period; just pure bloody-mindedness. This was a ridiculous form of regulation, and its scrapping will be applauded by the University of Tasmania's staff, who are looking for ways to save costs. Instead, they can spend money on expanding student services.

Australian beef exporters exporting to the European Union, of whom there are many in my electorate, will no longer have to tag their cattle with lime green tail tags for the European Union Cattle Accreditation Scheme. The reason for this is that we have electronic tags now, and they have been in operation for many years. This will save beef farmers about half a million dollars a year—barnacles on the hull, indeed.

I congratulate my parliamentary colleagues, all of whom worked so hard to produce this common-sense round of reforms, and I commend the bill to the house. I would encourage those opposite, and I would be very interested to see whether the member for Indi and the member for Kennedy, who are most interested in agriculture, support this deregulation measures. The member for Denison must hear from the many small businesses in his electorate in my home state about the burdens that are imposed on small business. I encourage him to support these changes. The member for Fairfax is a businessman in his own right—we all know that—and I encourage him to support these measures as well. I commend the bill to the House.

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