Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset, I want to mention that I am feeling a bit stiff this morning. On Saturday, I played rugby for the first time for about five years. I am feeling very much worse for wear. There is not much to report from the game except that the refereeing standard on Saturday was much better than on Friday night, unfortunately. As a Queensland senator, I just wanted to put that on record. I also want to say that we are here to talk about regulation. Regulations are a bit like refereeing—you cannot live with them and you cannot live without them. Unfortunately, the referee's decision can be very frustrating. Sometimes regulations are very frustrating, too, but we do need them. We need regulations in our economy. We need regulations for a variety of things. It is very important that we take stock from time to time to make sure the regulations we have are fit for purpose and are not redundant because all regulations come at some cost to small businesses.

Unlike Senator Bilyk, I am not going to question the motives, ethics or objectives of the other side. I am not going to call them childish or say that we want to take things away from not-for-profits. Apparently all of us on this side of the chamber are evil. We come in here every week just to see what we can do wrong to the Australian people. I do not think the other side are like that, not at all. I think they come in here with fine objectives. I think the crossbenchers come into this place with fine objectives. We all come here to try to do the best for our nation but I think those on the other side sometimes fall short of those objectives. It is not a question of their motives; it is a question of their competence. That is why we have had to do things like introduce the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2014) Bill 2014.

There is an old saying: if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves. The previous speaker has forgotten the merits of such a saying. Yes, some of these changes are small and minor, but if in your business, your family or your personal life you do the small things right, the bigger results will take care of themselves. Correcting a comma might be a small thing to Senator Bilyk, but it is about getting it right. If we get the small things right, the sum of those parts will make for a better result. To refer back to the disastrous game on Friday night when the Cowboys were very much dudded by refereeing decisions, they have to take some responsibility themselves because they did not get the small things right in the game, particularly in the first half. They missed some crucial tackles and they lost the game as a result. It is the same with this bill. We need to take care of the small things, even if we do not think they are important because they make a big difference and small changes over time can add up to a lot.

Someone I used to work with at the Productivity Commission came up with a statistic which I think is quite indicative of the problem we have here. Back in 1936, the parliament enacted a bill called the Income Tax Assessment Act, which is still with us today. Back in 1936, it took 120 pages to administer income tax in this country. Today it is just over 6,000 pages—it has come back a bit. When this statistic was done, it was just over 7,000 pages. It had increased to 7,000 pages in 80 years. If that growth rate were repeated over the next 80 years, if we continued to grow the tax act at that rate, by the end of this century the tax act would amount to 830 billion pages.