Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The motion reads:

That—

(1) The Senate notes:

a) the disastrous negotiations on the Financial Accountability Regime Bill 2022 and associated bills conducted by the Assistant Treasurer which plagued the financial industry with more uncertainty; and

b) fundamental mistakes and miscalculations in the Regulatory Impact Statement to the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 demonstrate that the Albanese Labor Government is pursuing a rushed and chaotic approach instead of a proper and transparent approach for such extreme reforms.

(2) A message be sent to the House of Representatives seeking its concurrence with paragraph (1) of this resolution.

(3) The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 be referred to the Education and Employment Legislation Committee for inquiry and report on the first sitting day of 2023.

What we have heard during the course of this week, during Senate question time, has been an endless litany from this government of failure to admit that the rushed approach to its extreme IR legislation is an approach riddled with mistakes and an approach that will have dire consequences for businesses, particularly small- and medium-sized businesses across the Australian economy. The mistakes in the regulatory impact statement of the government are such that it is clear this government has not done its homework on the IR bills that they are seeking to ram and rush through this parliament next week. The truth is they didn't take these reforms to an election. They didn't take them the Australian people. They didn't tell them upfront what they were going to do. This is a government that, instead, in its early days decided that it would try to drive through the parliament reforms that were not communicated and make sure that in doing so it was able to deliver for its union friends that which it wasn't game to tell the Australian people about beforehand.

What we've heard is that the regulatory impact statement miscalculated elements of the costs to small and medium-sized businesses and, as every day has gone by, we understand that more and more costs will be racked up and applied to Australian small and medium-sized businesses as a result of the government's approach. We were told that, in miscalculating those costs, it was in part because they were based on a few google searches, it seems. These searches were of some of the most curious and unusual businesses that you could seek to base an economic analysis upon.