Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I ask the parliamentary secretary, in response to his last answer: can he confirm for the House that he sees no link between the change in the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines and the subsequent wage cuts for Commonwealth cleaners? Will he sit down with the cleaners of this building and their representatives to explain to them why he thinks that there is no link whatsoever between the change to the guidelines and the changes to their wages, and to the wages of Commonwealth cleaners in DFAT and around the Commonwealth Public Service? That is my first set of questions for the parliamentary secretary.

The second set of questions also relates to the deregulation agenda. I want to remind the parliamentary secretary of some of the absolute crowning achievements in this area when it comes to deregulation carried out by him and by his predecessor, the now Assistant Treasurer. These are some of the achievements so far in the deregulation space: the government has changed clauses in 11 different pieces of legislation where from now on the law will omit the word 'e-mail' with a hyphen and substitute 'email' without a hyphen. There are 16 pieces of legislation where from now on the law will omit the words 'facsimile transmission' and substitute the word 'fax'. There are six pieces of legislation where from now on the law will omit the word 'trademark' and substitute the word 'trade mark', with a space. They have corrected a spelling error in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act so that the word 'committing' has the requisite two t's. They have corrected a punctuation error in the Fair Work Act 2009 to insert a comma between the words 'aircraft' and 'ship'; and there are 10 clauses in legislation in which a reference to the 'Legislative Assembly for the Northern Territory' must now be substituted with 'Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory'.

Can the parliamentary secretary inform us if the Office of Deregulation will conduct a review this year to determine the real economic impact of the repeal of these tremendously significant spelling errors, typos and lapsed legislation? And can he confirm for the House that the punctuation errors corrected in some of this legislation still saves the Commonwealth $350,000? Does he stand by that costing?

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