Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

On occasions—yes. I don't feel constrained to never repeat a story that I've told before, and there is an important story that I'd like to tell and that I think demonstrates what regulation is, what regulation means and why we need to be ever vigilant and to weed it out when it becomes irrelevant. It's a story I was told ages ago about a little boy that watched his grandfather cook a lamb roast. Every Sunday he'd come over and watch his grandfather prepare the roast. The grandfather would cut the two ends off the leg of lamb, put it in the oven tray and then put that in the oven. Of course, it was a beautiful thing to eat, and they were such fond memories.

One day that little boy grew up, and his grandfather came around for dinner. He said: 'You know what, Grandad? I'm going to cook you a lamb roast just like you used to cook.' And so he got out the lamb roast, cut the ends off and put it into the tray, and the grandfather said, 'Why did you cut the ends off?' And the little boy said, 'Well, Grandfather, that's what you always did when you did the lamb roast.' And he said, 'No, that's only because the pan I had was too small to fit the roast.'

And so it is with regulation. There are things we do because of tradition, because it's always been done like that, but you need to realise you need to always question, 'Why are we doing this?' This bill goes some way towards dealing with some of those old traditions. At the heart of our democratic system, to be honest, is a belief in the spirit of business and the spirit of entrepreneurialism.

I think that is why we all essentially believe in that one shared democratic experience of the expression of the individual, which, to me, is what business is. It really inspired me in business. The really good businesspeople that I that I admired weren't ever really interested in the money. The money was—someone described it to me this way—a way of keeping score. It's because they had this incredible passion, this idea to do something, and that something was always a good or a service which improved other people's lives.

The heart of this legislation and this government is to create those conditions for entrepreneurs to succeed. In one of my previous business experiences in construction I had the 'pleasure' of running a construction company. I didn't own it. In fact, the owners who had built this business long before I came along were a typical Gold Coast entrepreneurial family. They were also from the bush. They were literal cowboys who found themselves in construction, and they'd come up with this idea.

Anyone who worked in construction or engineering might know of sheet piling. Essentially, when you're digging out a basement, we come along and put in the shoring. That was theoretically to stop the hole from falling in on itself when it was dug out. It didn't always work out like that in practice, of course, but theoretically the sheet piling was there to keep the ground solid.

And they had come up with this idea. In fact, they had developed their own system, their own design, which they manufactured and installed. They spent tens of thousands of dollars securing the intellectual property, which has relevance to what I'm talking about here: providing more reliable and predictable systems for registering and managing trademarks and IP rights. They had this intellectual property, which they spent tens of thousands or more—hundreds of thousands—of dollars developing and patenting.

The point of those patents was not just to protect their business and their intellectual property; it was also to protect consumers. There was an example I remember of a competitor who had tried to copy their system, didn't get it right and had put these sheets into the ground. I can remember this story got a bit of media at the time. They were working next to a post office in Sydney somewhere, and the ground started to cave in. There was a post office next door, and the building started to literally shake. As the glass windows were smashing around these poor workers and customers as they fled the building, the hole started to fall in on itself. And that's because they were using a ripped-off system that provided no protection to the consumer and no protection to the business. Fundamentally, intellectual property is so important for those two reasons. It is not only there to protect your business; it is also there to protect the consumer from cheap imports.

I think it is also worth mentioning that this bill is not just about business, however. It is also about dealing with Centrelink and making it easier for people to deal with Services Australia. Again, it is about helping the provider, in this case the government, Services Australia, and helping the consumer, in this case the customer of Services Australia. All of us in my electorate know how frustrating it is, and that's why it is good to see that this sits in the overall strategy of this 'tell us once' approach to Services Australia. We all know, from dealing with constituents, just how frustrating it is when you're dealing with Centrelink at the best of times, but, when you've got to keep going back and giving them information that Centrelink really should be able to get from somewhere else, it's incredibly frustrating. In fact, it can be more than frustrating. It can be really quite psychologically debilitating. I'm sure we've all got constituents who come to us at the end of their tether because Services Australia have just been obtuse, I guess, in the way that they deal with people. This is going to, as I say, make it easier for Services Australia. It's going to provide relief to that operation and to the people working in that operation, but it's also going to provide relief to the people that actually have to deal with superannuation.

While the configuration of this chamber has changed midspeech, it's good to see there are some people here who may not be elected here but are here and might be able to follow the flow of the story. But I think it is fundamental to the Albanese Labor government's philosophy of 'nobody held back and nobody left behind' that we take this approach to make life easy for business, to make life easy for consumers, to make life easy for government departments and to make life easy for clients of government departments. At the heart of the Albanese government's strategy is to not rest on our laurels.

Incidentally, the member for Riverina left at one point, but, for those who have been following along, he made a point about business costs, and he used 2013 as a base. I can't remember the exact number he said, but they started off at about $60 billion, and now it's grown since 2013. It just made me wonder: why did he use 2013 as a base? That was actually when they took office last time. So, if business costs grew to such a big number that he felt it worth mentioning in this chamber, why didn't he use 2022 as the base? Why did he go back to 2013? It makes me think that the greatest rise was in that period from 2013. Now, I don't know for sure, but it is curious why he used that as a base.

This is where I'd like to finish. Fundamentally what this government are dealing with is not just problems that we've been left with from 2013 but also problems that we've been left with from over the last 30 years of mainly coalition rule. We have seen in general where this legislation sits. We have seen coalition governments follow a policy of neoliberalism—essentially privatisation—economic rationalism and unfettered free trade that has left working-class communities struggling. It has been left to the Albanese government to try and fix that up. So we are not only using legislation like this to make life easier for business but also making it easier for workers to find affordable housing, which ultimately will help business. We're making it easier for businesses to use cheaper energy—through renewable energy, mind you—and we are making it easier for our businesses, our foundational manufacturing, to compete against state owned enterprises.

I commend the bill to this House in the context in which it sits, which is the Albanese government's philosophy of nobody left behind and nobody held back.

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