Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 1) 2014 and the Amending Acts 1901 to 1969 Repeal Bill 2014. My colleague the member for Watson has spoken on the other bill before the House, the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2014) Bill 2014. Statute law revision bills are a routine piece of housekeeping undertaken by this parliament. They correct typographical and grammatical errors, they update language and they repeal spent or obsolete provisions. They are a completely unremarkable, largely clerical, practice which, in this country, dates back to before Federation. Commonwealth governments of both political persuasions have tended to introduce one or more such bills each year.

In the past, the Liberal Party has acknowledged as much. In 2013, Liberal Senator Gary Humphries spoke briefly in favour of the similar statute law revision bill which I introduced last year as Attorney-General in the Labor government. This is what Senator Humphries had to say:

Bills of this nature are traditionally non-controversial and receive the support of the parliament because they are regarded as an essential tool in the process of keeping the Commonwealth statute books accurate and up to date.

Bizarrely though, the new Abbott Liberal government has dressed up this humble housekeeping practice in the extreme ideology which is fast becoming its hallmark. The member for Kooyong has, quite grandly, said in this place that this routine legislation will reduce the regulatory burden by improving the accuracy and usability of Commonwealth legislation. As a result, the legislation will help to save individuals, businesses and community organisations, time and money. I am sorry that the member for Mitchell, who spoke before me, was not prepared to take an intervention, because I was going to ask him to explain how it is that the statute law revision bill saves even one cent for any organisation, business organisation or non-business organisation in this country. The answer that he would have been forced to give is 'not one cent', and he would not have been able to name one.

We are told, however, that this run-of-the-mill piece of legislation is an integral part of the government's repeal day stunt. In the ministerial statement that the Prime Minister delivered last week, the Prime Minister explained:

… repeal day will scrap more than 9,500 unnecessary or counterproductive regulations and 1,000 redundant acts of parliament.

He also said:

Removing just these will save individuals or organisations more than $700 million a year, every year.

The Prime Minister said that he was creating the 'biggest bonfire of regulations in our country's history'. We are not here debating the 9,500 spent and redundant regulations. All of them have been tabled and no doubt, in coming months, the parliament will have an opportunity to look at those. But as the names of them suggest, and the way in which repealing regulations is expressed, they deal with spent and redundant regulations—in other words, regulations that are no longer having the slightest effect on business life, on community life, on social life in our country. Just to deal with the statute law revision bill, I cannot really improve on the way in which Lenore Taylor, one of Australia's more observant and perceptive journalists, writing in the Guardian last week, helpfully summarised some of the mighty blows for freedom struck by this brave government in that piece of legislation. I quote from Lenore Taylor's article in the Guardian about the statute law revision bill:

1. Part two, paragraphs 10 to 57, lists the clauses in 11 different pieces of legislation where from now on the law will “omit the word “e-mail”, and substitute “email”.

So 'e-mail' with a hyphen is being replaced by 'email' without a hyphen. Lenore Taylor goes on:

Part three, paragraphs 58 to 91, lists the clauses in 16 pieces of legislation where from now on the law will “omit the words “facsimile transmission” and substitute the word “fax".

…   …   …

Schedule five lists 10 cases in which a reference to “legislative assembly for the Northern Territory” must now be substituted with “legislative assembly of the Northern Territory”.

…   …   …

Schedule one, part 27, corrects a punctuation error in the Fair Work Act 2009 to insert a comma in between the words “aircraft” and “ship”.

…   …   …

Schedule one, part 39, corrects a spelling error in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act so that the word “committing” has the requisite two “t”s.

It is a pity that this government was not paying less attention to the spelling of the word 'committing' in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act and a little bit more attention to the problems that might be caused to the actual marine park that the act deals with by the depositing of millions of tonnes of dredge spoil. The arrogance of this government and of its Attorney-General is staggering. The Prime Minister, the Attorney-General and the member for Kooyong should be ashamed of themselves for dressing up this sort of proofreading exercise as any sort of reform. They should be ashamed to front the Australian people promising to remove red tape and then serve up this laundry list of spelling corrections and style-guide pedantry.

The piece de resistance of this laughable, pathetic, repeal day stunt is the amending acts repeal bill, a bill which does nothing more than formally repeal transitional and amending legislation enacted between 1901 and 1969. It removes from the statute books pieces of legislation which are already inoperative. An example is the repeal of the Flags Act 1954, a piece of legislation that amended the Flags Act 1953. The amending act, that no longer has any force, changed the outer diameter of the Commonwealth Star, set out in the Flags Act 1953, from three-eighths to three-tenths of the width of the flag. I mention this because last week my office fielded concerned calls about the repeal of this amending act—'Would the government's repeal of the amending legislation mean that the national flag, and in particular the Commonwealth Star on the national flag, would change its dimensions?' Apparently the Prime Minister's office, who the callers had asked first, were quite certain that this was not the case, but were unclear and unable to explain why that was so.

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