Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this very important matter of public importance. I know, because there is a lot of interest in and talk about getting rid of red tape and reducing regulation. For that, we are all supportive. Red tape ought to go as much as is possible. Unnecessary redundant regulations ought to go wherever possible. That is exactly what Labor did in government and we did it in spades, but we did not crow about it and we did not have special days in honour of doing the normal work of business. It is what a government ought to do every single day. It is what a government ought to do as a matter of normal business. It is what governments should be doing.

We need to examine very closely what this mob are up to when they say that they are cutting red tape and getting rid of regulation. It is actually a very big smokescreen. It is a big cloak for what they are actually doing which is removing consumer protections and taking away hard fought and hard won protections. When people come to see me—whether they are consumers or small businesses—they often come about things that burden them, about things that are happening in the market and about things for which the government ought to be doing more to protect them. So they often come about the two things—yes we want to get rid of red tape, yes we want to make life easier—and that is exactly what Labor did in government. We did it with business name registrations, which used to be an absolute nightmare under the mob from across the way, the Liberals and the Nationals. During their time you were required to register your business in seven different jurisdictions across the states and territories, either by paper or online. There was a different system in all of them and if you wanted to register your small business across Australia, it would cost over $1,000 and take you an enormous deal of effort. What Labor did to reduce red tape, to get rid of regulations and to reduce the cost was to actually do it properly and do it by making sure that we had an online system, seven days a week, 24 hours of the day. It worked absolutely fantastically for small businesses.

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