Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise and speak on the Corporations Legislation Amendment (Deregulation and Other Measures) Bill 2014. This bill forms part of our government's commitment to repeal counterproductive, unnecessary and redundant legislation and regulations. I would like to start by giving an example from my electorate of Hughes of some of those burdensome regulations that tie the hands of small business. This example in the retail sector shows the absurdity of this regulation, the stupidity of it, and the big task that we have of working through and repealing this red tape to free the hands of entrepreneurs in this nation.

There is a shopping centre in my electorate called the Homemakers Centre, at Warwick Farm. It is on the Hume Highway and has six lanes of road on either side. Opposite is Warwick Farm racecourse. In the front of the shopping centre there are two large takeaway outlets. There is a very large car park. There are a lot of shops in there. Next door is the Masterton Homes display village, and on the other side of this is a small motel. It is an ideal location for a shopping centre.

A few regulations were put on that centre at a few retailers. I would like to compare the regulations in my electorate to the regulations in Afghanistan under the Taliban's control. I will quote from a 2001 article by Amy Waldman published inTheNew York Times. It is a story from Herat in Afghanistan. It says:

Hefozullah, a seller of cooking oil, was arrested at the marketplace for keeping his shop open during Friday prayers. He was sent to jail for four days and became No. 3,183 in a registry of arrests at the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The article goes on and talks about 'the penal code promulgated by the Taliban's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar', which sets out in copious detail what retailers in Herat—in Taliban controlled Afghanistan—can and cannot sell. I will quote directly from the article. It says:

Those who fly pigeons—a favorite Afghan pastime—will be imprisoned until ''their pigeons disappear from their home.''

Then it goes on and lists all the things that are banned from sale from retail shops. It says:

A kite seller will be imprisoned for three days.

It lists other things that are banned:

… cinematography, any equipment that produces the joy of music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computer, VCR's, televisions … wine, … nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures, Christmas cards.

It goes on:

Nothing was left to chance or the imagination under the Taliban. Merchants importing products like shampoo would find that Taliban customs officials had gouged out the eyes of the female models on the boxes. The merchants were then required to display the products with black tape over female faces, or be subject to a beating or jailing.

The journalist goes on:

It is no wonder that residents here react as if waking from a grotesque dream.

Compare that list of things that were banned under the Taliban from being sold with the recent court decision of the New South Wales Supreme Court. Here, where the Taliban had a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforcing those red-tape regulations, we have similar regulations, but they are being enforced by the Land and Environment Court and the New South Wales Court of Appeal.

The case was the Warehouse Group (Australia)—they were the appellant—versus those champions of free market competition Woolworths Limited. This was a case where three senior judges were involved in the Court of Appeal with Queen's Counsel—a platoon of legal experts—working out what a retail shop in my electorate could and could not sell. There were many days of court hearings and a rather lengthy decision.

I will read through some of the list of things that were banned, not in Taliban controlled Afghanistan but in the electorate of Hughes, which I represent. There is a list here of over 40—it is in roman numerals. It goes to over 50 separate items. I would like to go through a few of them. Item (i): floor coverings were banned from sale. Small plastic containers were banned from sale. Garbage bins were banned. Paint was banned, as were paint accessories—it goes on—dust masks and paint scrapers. Dangerous items that need government control such as kitchen implements, mashers, vegetable peelers, kitchen hand food storage containers, curtains and accessories were also banned. Curtain tassels were banned—we must have laws in this country to control the sale of dangerous curtain tassels! Item (xxx) on the list of banned items is baby goods. Baby bibs were banned from sale, along with baby strollers, baby prams and baby car seats, and item (xxxv) on the banned list is child's potties. In this country we have such red tape and such regulation that we are required to have in the New South Wales Supreme Court Court of Appeal three distinguished and learned judges and a platoon of lawyers making a decision that a retail shop in my electorate should be banned from selling child's potties.

The list goes on. Other things banned included dog toys—we cannot have anyone selling dog toys! And there are bird cages. While the Taliban would ban the sale of pigeons or anything related, we just ban the sale of bird cages. Toys are banned. Item (xlvii) is sheets. Again, while the Taliban Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice would simply ban any equipment that reproduces the joy of music, at least our court of appeal detailed those things that reproduce the joy of music that are banned. Prerecorded videos were banned, prerecorded CDs, prerecorded audiotapes, blank videos, blank CDs and, item (lix), blank audio tapes. They were all banned from sale. On the Taliban list of banned items it was simply Christmas cards, but of course our New South Wales Supreme Court was able to do better than that—they set out the things that were banned from being sold in a retail shop in my electorate: Christmas goods, Christmas trees, Christmas decorations and, just like the Taliban, Christmas cards. We simply cannot have shops in Australia being unauthorised sellers of Christmas cards. How would we get on without this red tape? At least in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan retail shops could sell bottles of shampoo as long as they gouged the eyes out of the women on the boxes or put black tape over them. In my electorate, thanks to the decisions and the red tape and regulation we have, we simply banned it altogether.

This is just an example of the regulation and red tape that we have. Other parts of my electorate fare even worse. It is not a matter of just having a list of things that they are not allowed to sell—dangerous goods such as potties and Christmas cards and things that reproduce the joys of music. We had in my electorate what was known as the Orange Grove shopping centre. On one side of Orange Grove Road we had a big Officeworks and on the other side a big Harvey Norman complex. Do we know what happened to Orange Grove shopping centre? They did not have a list of goods they were banned from selling—they were simply banned from operating. The red tape and regulation by the then New South Wales Labor-controlled state government simply banned them from operating and selling anything. That was done when former senator Bob Carr was New South Wales Premier—better known now as the senator who complained about not having silk pyjamas on an international flight; he complained about how unfair it was that he had to travel business class and about the quality of food and the types of music he could listen to. The very same Senator Carr was the one who banned a complete retail shopping centre from selling any of those goods. Silk pyjamas were banned, food was banned and of course the sale of any musical item was banned—the very things that Senator Carr complained about when he was forced to put up with the hardship of travelling in business class. These are just some examples of the red tape we have in this country.

This bill is estimated to reduce business compliance costs by around $14 million. The measures in the bill provide a better balance between the rights of shareholders to raise issues with a company and the costs to companies required to hold a general meeting. The bill will improve and reduce remuneration reporting requirements, clarify the circumstances in which a financial year may be less than 12 months, exempt certain companies limited by guarantee from the need to appoint or retain an auditor, improve the operation of the Takeovers Panel and extend the Remuneration Tribunal's remuneration setting responsibility to include certain statutory bodies.

There is some urgency in this action we are taking because we have some serious difficulties in this country. We face the problem of an ageing population. Commodity prices for our largest exports of coal and iron ore that were quite high under the previous government's term are coming back. Perhaps the biggest problem we have to deal with is servicing the interest on Labor's debt. For the past six years the previous Labor government simply—and this is the best way to explain it—ran this country at a loss. In each of those six years they spent more money than they raised.

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