Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) | Hansard source

The Office of Parliamentary Counsel prepares what is a routine statute maintenance, and through the Statue Update Bill 2026, the statute updates will happen. It makes technical amendments to enhance the accuracy and operation of Commonwealth legislation. The member for Moore has just spent the best part of 15 minutes telling us, 'There's nothing to see here, nothing to worry about.' I always get a little bit concerned when Labor members utter such words, because you can never be quite sure lately when government members stand at the despatch box or at the lectern in either the House of Representatives or the Federation Chamber and say, 'All will be well.'

He also went to great lengths to talk about the necessity of sorts to reduce the amount of paper being spent printing bills and the like. Interestingly, at the weekend I see in the Sunday Telegraph James O'Doherty's column 'The Sauce', no less. Under the heading 'Papering Cracks', he refers to the New South Wales parliament. I appreciate we are the Commonwealth parliament, but it's interesting because the same sorts of things that happen in state parliaments occur here. Here we have the good old Greens, in this case Cate Faehrmann, costing taxpayers—wait for this—$733,000 in public servant hours with a parliamentary call for papers relating to music and arts grants, and what happened? Her parliamentary demand resulted in almost 700 boxes of paper arriving at her office. Can you just imagine that? You know what she did? Having called for the parliamentary papers, she then complained when they arrived because there were so many volumes of papers. The Greens MP says the volume of documents produced under her call for papers motion was 'absolutely ridiculous'. O'Doherty wrote:

Faehrmann made the complaints when seeking other documents, which she wanted in an "electronic form"—something the parliament refuses to do. Government emails are instead printed out, stapled and put in boxes. As someone who has spent hours poring over physical government documents, this Sauce columnist reckons she has a point. It's about time parliament joined the 21st century.

That is one thing, but that Greens MP, albeit at a state level, is just like any other Greens political party MP. They want something, they demand something, and, when they get it, they're never quite happy. They're never quite satisfied. It's so typical of the Greens.

I'm old enough to have started in the newspaper industry when we were still—I can see the smiles of those opposite—using typewriters, would you believe? They were good old Remington typewriters.

I've got a colleague who understands well! Thank you to my Tasmanian colleague. She gets it too. We used typewriters. And when the teletext machine would whirr into action, everybody got excited, because, at a country newspaper, it was something coming from afar. People might have thought it wasn't such a professional outfit, but when I became editor of the Daily Advertiser in 1991, I had 58 journalists in my newsroom, and there were 230 people or more who worked full time on that newspaper. They were heady days in the print industry. More's the pity, it's not the same now. I digress.

When the teletext machine whirred, we knew that something was happening. Generally, it was the Greens being the Greens. They were just starting as a political movement. They were just getting a little bit of unfortunate traction, and, instead of something important happening, they were the biggest users of the fax machine, which you couldn't stop. You couldn't dictate who was going to send something or not fax through the good old facsimile machine. It was the same with the teletext. The Greens political party are the biggest abusers of environmental processes. Heaven help them if they were here to talk about the very important statute update bill.

Schedule 1 of this bill contains 126 amendments across Commonwealth acts, and schedule 2 repeals more than 100 spent amending acts. As the member for Moore quite correctly pointed out—and he did, and I'll give him his due—the bill updates and maintains the accuracy and coherence of Commonwealth legislation, by correcting drafting errors, by repealing spent provisions, by removing obsolete legislative material and by updating terminology and cross-references inasmuch as where apostrophes—and nobody uses apostrophes any more, more's the pity; I do; I'm a real technical grammar—

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