Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hughes for his contribution. It is wonderful to hear how countries that have very little regulation flourish while those that are regulated do not. I travelled recently to a Pacific island which I will not name. Because I am a bit of a cyclist I took some things that most people would not take—a pair of pedals, a pedal spanner and cycling shoes, as well as my helmet, so that I could hire a bike and still clip in. Imagine my horror when I got there and I realised that not only were the screws that hold the pedals on the bikes not uniform on this Pacific island, where of course they would be in most of world, but their threads were not uniform either. You could buy a bolt and a nut and they would not fit. This is a country with so little regulation that you could not even use last year's nut out of your toolbox with this year's bolt.

To assume that all regulation is bad and all regulation ties us up and makes life unpleasant is quite ridiculous. In Australia, we live in a society where our balconies do not fall down, when you put the brakes on the car stops in a straight line, toys for sale do not have lead in them and their parts do not fall off creating a choking risk for a child, and you can get on a roller-coaster without fearing that it will fall down. We have a level of convenience and trust in what we buy that comes from regulation. Regulation can do really good things. I would appreciate it if the government did not attempt, in this debate, to demonise all regulation. You need to be able to pick the good from the bad, but we are not hearing that from the other side. Red tape repeal day is supposed to be about red tape, which is the paperwork that you need to fill in to prove that you did something or to get permission to do something. Having been a small business owner, I know that it is annoying. Sometimes it is valuable as you can use what you put into the form for your business purposes; at other times it is just annoying and you wonder why it is necessary.

With the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2014) Bill 2014 and related bills we are talking about all spin and no substance. I have been looking forward to this day, to see what the government would come up with that would result in the great unshackling of small businesses who are drowning under red tape. What would they take out for small business on this repeal day? Having read all the bills and all the explanatory memoranda, which took me some time because there were a lot of pages produced, the answer is that very little has been taken out. The small things that have been taken out are the kinds of housekeeping matters that would normally have passed through this House uncontroversially, in the Federation Chamber, on any day of any parliament that has sat in living memory. I often talk about the amount of spin that is in politics and I liken it to sugar. Governments of all persuasions like to put a bit of sugar on their policies, to make them look a bit shiny when they are presented. That is part of the job. It is like putting the cinnamon sugar on a doughnut. But there is supposed to be a doughnut. Under all that sugar there is supposed to be a doughnut. Before someone says that there are holes in doughnuts I will say they are right, because even if you get a policy right there will always be someone who is unsatisfied with something. Someone will always find a hole in it. However, there is supposed to actually be a doughnut under all the sugar. This legislation is just sugar. When you peel away the rhetoric we have heard from the government since the election, the bills are just sugar.

We have heard Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the lead-up to this debate, in the media reports and in his own speech, saying the childcare centres were subject to so many pages of law restricting their capacity to operate. The impression was given, and the reasonable expectation was created, that in these pages of repeals there would be something on child care. There is not. Despite all the hype, all the spin, all the promises and all the raising of expectations, these bills effectively repeal legislation that was automatically going to be repealed anyway. When we were in government we repealed 16,000 bills, but we also found ways to automatically repeal bills which became redundant so that we did not have to pull a stunt like repeal day. It happened automatically. In order to get the numbers up in the childcare area, the government has gone through and found bills that were scheduled to automatically repeal under their sunset provisions and brought their repeal dates forward, so that they could count them. There were public servants working that out at a time when the government was saying we had budget emergency. In September, when the government stated that there was work to do and they were going to hit the ground running, they had departmental staff going through legislation, finding provisions that were scheduled to be repealed automatically, and adding them to a list so they could count them. It is truly extraordinary and it must be extremely disappointing for those in the childcare sector who may have thought there might have been some real work done, rather than the rhetoric and spin.

We heard about local cafes that serve alcohol and have to negotiate 75 sets of local, state and national regulations. It is well worth dealing with that, but it is hard to repeal that type of legislation as you have to negotiate with the states and do some work. Is there anything in all of these thousands of pages that actually delivers on the government's promises? No.

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