Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I take the opportunity today to sum up on the bills before the House: the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2014) Bill 2014, the Amending Acts 1901 to 1969 Repeal Bill 2014 and the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 1) 2014. This is very hard for the Labor Party to stomach. We have come up with an idea that you did not think of first. We have come up with an idea to deregulate the Australian economy, not re-regulate the Australian economy. On the omnibus bill, we have heard from the members on our side—not from the members opposite—of how aged-care building certification will no longer be duplicated at the federal and state level and how Telstra will not have to provide 70,000 pages of wholesale contracts to the ACCC because now they can just provide a list of the contracts they enter into to the ACCC, with the opportunity for the ACCC to ask for those individual contracts as they wish.

All the measures within the omnibus bill, together with the legislation that we introduced last week in the House, and a whole range of other measures that we have either previously introduced or have done in an administrative manner, have produced a $720 million pay-off for the Australian economy, for small businesses, for families and for not-for-profit organisations. This has got rid of more than 10,000 unnecessary and redundant regulations and acts. Why didn't you think of that? The reason the Labor Party did not think of this is that their default position is to regulate. The default position in their DNA is to increase regulation. Twenty-one thousand additional regulations were introduced under the previous Rudd and Gillard governments. That is a shameful legacy. And what did it mean? It meant that multifactor productivity in this country fell by around three per cent in the five years from mid-2007. The World Economic Forum did a survey of 148 countries and found that Australia was a pitiful 128th in terms of the overall regulatory burden. The Economist Intelligence Unit did a survey of 51 countries for productivity growth, and where did Australia come? Fiftieth out of 51, only marginally ahead of Botswana.

Ms Rishworth interjecting—

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