Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2025 and would like to inform the House that I'll also be moving an amendment to it. I'm supportive of this bill because it contains a number of practical and positive changes, including the implementation of the tell-us-once principle for businesses, which is a long overdue step that will increase efficiency and reduce duplication.

Good regulation is absolutely critical. When it is done well, it improves the lives of both citizens and businesses by making systems more navigable, reducing red tape and allowing more time and resources to be spent on creating value. Reforms like this matter. But I want to be clear: this bill as it currently stands is extremely modest, and the scale of the challenge we as an economy face is extremely large. If the government is truly going to make a difference to productivity through legislative and regulatory reform, it has a very, very long way to go and it needs to up its ambition.

I will talk about three areas where I believe the government needs to address regulation and needs to step up its ambition. The government needs to prioritise the areas which can make the biggest difference to the economy, needs to update its speed in addressing these issues—including by utilising AI—and needs to change incentives fundamentally. It also needs to change the mindset where government is effectively a monopoly provider of services to the economy and acts like that, and abuses its monopoly powers like many other organisations across the economy. It is time the government acted like a service provider to citizens as customers rather than as a monopoly provider, with all the abuses that come from there. I'll use a particular example that goes to an amendment I am moving to this bill, to show how ridiculous—I can't think of a better word—government sometimes behaves in its bureaucratic activities as opposed to trying to address the issues our citizens face and doing that as easily as possible.

Let me start with ambition on regulatory reform. I was extremely heartened when the Treasurer stood up and spoke about the book Abundance. The message was clear—that is, supply-side reform is required to deliver things the community wants, including cheaper energy and housing that is affordable and accessible. These are the things the entire community wants. It doesn't matter what side of politics you are from; we all want families and young people to be able to access housing. I want all Australians to be able to access energy as cheaply as possible while doing the right thing in terms of emissions reduction. It was right for the Treasurer to acknowledge that supply-side reform is critical to this. I think it's positive that we see a government on the progressive side of parliament talking about red tape reduction, because this is normally the area that is left to the conservative side of parliament.

The question now is whether the government is going to act enough on the issues it identified. Let me talk about those three areas where I think it needs to work hard. Firstly, it needs to prioritise areas of the economy that need reform most urgently from a regulatory reform point of view. These include the EPBC Act, housing and industrial relations. I give the government credit that they are trying to address the EPBC Act and regulatory reform there, and they have made modest steps in relation to housing. However, I want to call out that, from a housing point of view, there are further ways they need to go, including incentivising the states effectively to make the regulatory reforms required. The way they are currently incentivising the states is not working because all the states are not going to meet the current incentive structure the government is planning to use. The government has to rethink how it is going to incentivise the states to reduce regulatory burden.

The other area the government should be addressing, honestly, is industrial relations. This is a real blind spot for the government, I believe. In this country we have always had a pendulum approach to industrial relations reform, where one of the major parties comes in and brings in lots of red tape and then the other major party comes in and changes a lot. It's incredibly unproductive and very damaging for businesses and consumers. At the moment we're having a pendulum-swinging approach to legislation rather than sitting down, getting the Productivity Commission to look at our industrial relations settings and saying, 'Okay, what is the impact on productivity in our industrial relations settings, what is the impact on growth and what are the trade-offs we're willing to make?' We will always make trade-offs to protect workers—that is important—but at the moment we can't even have a civilised examination of the evidence to see where we could make a difference and what the trade-offs that we're implicitly making are in an ideological way as opposed to a fact based way.

I want to call out the government's reluctance over the last four years, or coming up to four years, to actually look at award simplification. This is an area where the government could legitimately show to businesses that they're serious about trying to make things better for business as well as for workers. When I talked to my niece and she asked me, 'Am I being paid correctly?' it took me hours to try and work out whether she was being paid correctly, because of the complexity of the awards. That complexity serves nobody except lawyers, and it stops us moving forward as a country. This is an area where the government could take action in a way that continues to protect workers, but it hasn't to date.

If the government is serious about regulatory reform, firstly it needs to get more serious about housing reform, and it needs to look at industrial relations as well. Secondly, it needs to up its ambition on speed. It has been six months since the election; it has been probably five months since the Treasurer spoke on these issues. There have been, as I understand, around 400 areas of regulatory reform identified by the regulators as potential areas of reform, but we need the government to be showing what the plan is to address these areas and how quickly they're going to deal with this, because this is hard.

This really comes to the third point I want to make. I believe we need to change the incentive structure around regulatory reform. There was a lot of discussion at the economic reform roundtable about the idea of balancing risk and growth, and this is quite a fundamental question that we are trying to face as a country, because regulation is there for very good reason. It manages risk. But regulation in various forms can also have a very big impact on growth. We need to acknowledge that difference, and we need to consider how those two interact. But, as regulators, the incentives are all about risk, so it is up to the parliament and the government to indicate that growth and opportunity are also needed in terms of how we think about our regulatory settings. This is where we need some explicit guidance to regulators to do this, and I believe we need some incentives to achieve that as well. To achieve those incentives, what we need to do is to have some hard measures and targets around this. I asked the Treasurer last week about whether he would put in targets, potentially around regulatory reform. He said he's talking to the Productivity Commission about this, and I think that is an appropriate step, but what I want to know is when he is going to come back to the House and report on those measures.

Regulatory reform and red-tape reduction are really hard, because all the incentives across the economy, particularly in this House, are: 'If there's a problem, let's regulate, because it's no cost to anyone.' I often hear this: 'If you just put in a regulation, it doesn't cost the budget anything.' In many cases, it doesn't cost the budget anything, but it costs businesses something, and that is the problem. That is why we do need to change the incentives around regulation. We need to change the guidance to the regulators, but we also need to create some hard targets for the government to be held accountable to, and I support the real push of the BCA and other business groups around this.

The second point I want to make on this is one that was made by the previous speaker, which is that government is a service provider, but it is a monopoly service provider. Across the economy, we are suspicious, as a country, of monopoly service providers because we know that, if you let a monopoly run a service, you often get poor service, and that is what we get too often from government. I have had so many conversations with members of my community who have gone to Services Australia for a particular issue and have literally spent hours on the phone and then have been cut off and couldn't get back on the calls.

All of these issues relate to how government interacts with individuals. The truth is that government is not accountable for this, because how do you hold government to account on this if you're just a citizen? That is what we have to do. I believe that we, as a parliament, need to reorient ourselves towards what the things are that make a difference in people's lives, what their touchpoints with government are and how to make it as easy as possible to deal with government. How can we do that?

That comes to my amendment, because it is about a terrible case of government working completely against the interests of the country and of individuals. I have a constituent, Major Caitlin Pedel. She is a member of our armed forces. She was posted overseas while she was pregnant. Because she was posted overseas rather than deployed—because pregnant women cannot be deployed—she was refused paid parental leave, which is open to all Australians, because she was going to be overseas for more than the requisite amount of time. She was serving the Australian people overseas, but, because of the technicality that she was posted overseas, she was not eligible for paid parental leave.

The services are a really important part of my electorate. I have three enormous bases in my electorate: Watson, Kuttabul and the Victoria Barracks. I deeply respect the contribution that the defence services make to our community, and they are really important parts of our community. But the feedback I get constantly from the defence services is that we don't pay enough attention to families when we look at defence.

So let's see what Caitlin's experience was. She appealed this decision, and she won, which was great. You'd say: 'Okay, this is great. This is positive. She gets her paid parental leave.' Services Australia, in its infinite wisdom, decided to take her to the Federal Court to overturn this. She won the first time, but then Services Australia got her on appeal, and they won. So Caitlin Pedel has been rejected from having $14,000-odd worth of paid parental leave paid to her as a member of our Australian Defence Force. Services Australia has spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting a member of our Defence Force to stop her getting paid parental leave.

Let's be honest: paid parental leave is open to all Australians—any Australian, actually, who fits the criteria. She fits the criteria. The only reason she didn't was that she was deployed overseas for Australia. Because she was out of the country for a certain number of weeks, she was no longer eligible for this, and Services Australia took a completely bureaucratic, narrow interpretation of the law and took her to court. I just sit there and go, 'What a waste of money and what a perfect example of government fighting against what it actually believes.' I can't think of a single person in this House who would argue that a member of our Defence Force, when posted overseas, shouldn't be eligible for paid parental leave, but this is how the law is currently drafted, and Services Australia pursued this rather than accepting the natural justice of it.

I have been trying to get the government to change this law for over a year, and they still haven't made any changes. I still have not had from the government any amendment that would make a change for the future. So I am putting forward an amendment to this piece of legislation that will, as I understand it based on the drafters, ensure that this situation won't happen for other people in the future.

I spoke to Caitlin this morning, and I have to say I have full admiration for her. She said: 'Look, it's not about me. I just want this not to happen for other people. I know that there are other people out there who are also being denied paid parental leave because they have been posted overseas.' She's just trying to fix this wrong, and I am just asking the government to do something about this. I have been asking them to do this for the last year. I've been asking very politely. I think that this is an example of where the government needs to act, and it should be acting today. So I ask the government to support this amendment or to come up with a better answer and a timeframe under which it is going to be delivered.

In closing, the point that I'm trying to make here is that government is a monopoly. It is an imperfect monopoly, and it abuses its power. I think we need strong incentives to make sure that government acts in the interests of the country and its citizens. When it sees bureaucratic knots being tied amongst its citizens, it should act. If it's not willing to act on these little issues, where there's a clear path, I have little confidence that it is going to act on the big issues that are more difficult to fix.

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