Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

One of the things that I have noted about having the stewardship of this deregulatory agenda is that laziness in one area breeds laziness in all areas. I know that members opposite may be happy to put up with poor grammar and over-hyphenation. It may be that you are radically pro hyphen, that you would hyphen everywhere you could and that you would ignore over-hyphenation. It is very interesting, because when we read the annual report what we found was that, for the first time ever, this government undertook a very thoroughgoing audit of the costs of regulation on the Australian economy. The figure that was derived from that report was $65 billion worth of cost effect on the Australian economy from Commonwealth regulation. We broke that down very thoroughly, per department, and we also broke it down in ways that show that the more minor contribution to that $65 billion worth of effect on the economy is in what you might call the acts and regulatory instruments, in the way in which they are devised and written. Underneath that, from recollection, around 80 per cent of the impact of the cost occurs from departmental-level decisions, forms and ongoing issues that relate to the way in which departments interpret the acts and regulations. What we have done—and I think that this is a virtue, not the vice that members opposite would have it be—is that we chase both the big things and the little things.

It is very interesting that the member raised the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, which I agree had grammar which was appalling. It should never have been drafted in the way that it was. I cannot remember whether it was a previous Liberal or Labor government; I do not know. But, very interestingly, alongside those amendments—which were indeed very grammatical and would have had minor cost effects—there were also changes, because we identified that there were state regimes in the very act that the member talks about, which governs the installation and maintenance of pontoon devices on the Barrier Reef according to the Commonwealth regulation. We did tidy that up, as you point out, in a grammatical way, but also there was a slightly more substantive change. What that did was, in effect, redact those parts of the Commonwealth legislation that purported to have, and for some time had had, an impact the users and installers of pontoon devices on the Great Barrier Reef.

We went through a business cost calculation method. The saving was admittedly modest. From recollection, we calculated that the savings were in the vicinity of about $5,000 per year, because under the very act that my friend talks about there were a very small number of operators who were forced to abide by both a Commonwealth regime and a state regime that were doing precisely the same thing. To the member for Rankin, that may be something which is unimportant, but if you are operating a pontoon on the Great Barrier Reef and have to abide by two separate regimes which both require you to do essentially the same thing and fill in two sets of forms then the requirement that you have is too onerous and unnecessary, and it is worth looking at. If we can tidy up the grammar of the act at the same time, so be it. The sort of laziness that we had opposite is a laziness that not only stops you from looking at commas and hyphenation but then stops you from looking at and investigating acts like the very one that he mentioned, where there were significant cost savings to be had from businesses not having to go through a dual application and maintenance process for pontoons on the Barrier Reef.

The thing about looking at the acts, if you bother to do so, is that, very interestingly, what we have done is not merely to chase down those rats and mice but to look at much larger operational items. For instance, for the first time ever the e-tax system prepopulates. On calculations inside this government and the departments on the business cost calculator model, that saves 1.6 million-odd self-assessing Australians $156 million of their time.

Now I will get to the cleaners. Let me explain to the member for Rankin how causation works. Causation is not proved by saying if event A happened before event B then event A caused event B. What stands as proof quite clear of that— (Time expired)

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