Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

What we just saw was extraordinary. We had government members en masse voting to take themselves off the speaking list. That is what they all just did. We had about eight people from the opposition on the speaking list so it was all going to happen within the time allotted anyway and we would have voted earlier. The only thing that happened with the gag motion was that government members made sure that they did not have to speak. Government members made sure that they were not forced into the humiliating position of having to defend all the hype that the member for Kooyong has attached to today, because today will be as big a fizzer as the last repeal day was.

We have today, for a full day of parliamentary sittings, a grand total of $1.8 million of savings. That is what they are here boasting about in the same week they have added $5.1 million worth of compliance costs onto motorists throughout Australia. More than double additional compliance costs have been put in place in the same week of their big repeal day that delivers only $1.8 million. And you really have to ask some questions about the $1.8 million.

The role of one of the bills we have in front of us is to change punctuation. Its role is to remove hyphens, semicolons and commas and to return commas to other places. It will correct a spelling error that was made in 1995 that the Howard government had not picked up on and we did not pick up on. The member for Kooyong has found it so we need to set aside a day to be able to deal with the additional costs associated with this!

We are dealing with a number of bills today. The first one is the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2014) Bill 2014. This one amends or repeals legislation in the Agriculture, Communications, Environment, Immigration and Border Protection, Industry, Prime Minister and Cabinet, Social Services, Treasury and Veterans' Affairs portfolios. The majority of the measures in this bill are not contentious and in fact the majority of them have zero deregulatory savings attached to them. There is nothing in the majority of the measures to suggest that there is some great burden of regulation that is going to be lifted from small business as a result of their implementation.

Let me give you some examples of what we are getting rid of with the omnibus repeal day bill. We are getting rid of the Fishing Industry Policy Council, which was established by law in 1991 and has never met.

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