Senator DARMANIN (Victoria—Deputy Government Whip in the Senate) (12:53): The bill before the Senate, the Corporations (Review Fees) Amendment (Technical Amendments) Bill 2025, as Senator Channel has pointed out, relates to the annual fees paid by registered companies to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, or ASIC, on the anniversary of their registration. This legislation simply affirms the longstanding fee structure for the relevant company review fees collected by ASIC. For those who may be unfamiliar, ASIC collects fees from users to register and maintain business entities as part of its regulatory functions. The review fees act provides ASIC with authority to collect these review fees. The fees themselves and the methods for calculating them are set out in the Corporations (Review Fees) Regulations 2003. In 2011, the Corporation (Review Fees) Amendment Regulations were introduced with the clear intention that the registration fees would be indexed annually so they would keep pace with inflation and maintain their real value of the time. However, an administrative drafting error in the 2011 amendments inadvertently reset all review fees, not just those that had been increased. This has had the unintended effect of resetting the indexation of a range of fees, including late fees, 10-year upfront fees and special company review fees, back to their 2009 base rates. Despite this technical error, ASIC has, since 2011, continued to apply indexation in accordance with the original policy intent. I note that the explanatory statement to the 2011 amendment regulations makes clear that the parliament's intention was for indexation to apply consistently with ASIC's practice. As ASIC explained in its submission to the Economics Legislation Committee inquiry into this bill, the inconsistency of the amendment with the intended policy outcome was technical in nature, was not immediately obvious and was not identified at the time the amendments were made. ASIC identified this discrepancy during a routine review of the review fees regulations in 2024. Once it was identified, the government acted swiftly, announcing regulatory amendments in March 2025 to ensure that ASIC was properly authorised to collect the registration fees that businesses had been charged. This legislation gives effect to the original policy intent by retrospectively validating ASIC's collection of review fees from 1 July 2011 through to March 2025. Because the bill relates to fees charged over that period, it necessarily applies retrospectively. As the explanatory memorandum makes clear, this retrospective application is required to ensure that the law operates as originally intended and that the fees charged since 2011 are legally valid. Importantly, the retrospective operation of the bill also provides continuity and certainty for entities that have already paid these fees. The explanatory memorandum states that the amendments do not affect these entities nor do they impact their interests or rights. In developing these regulations and this bill, states and territories were notified of the proposed changes on 5 February last year and again in October last year through the Legislative and Governance Forum for Corporations. I want to highlight a key point made by the Economics Legislation Committee in its report. Once the miscalculation was identified in 2024, ASIC and the government acted promptly to address it. I also want to note that these amendments will have no impact on the fees charged to the users of the ASIC business registers. These fees are well known to the business community, are publicly accessible through ASIC's website and reflect the amounts that ASIC has consistently charged and that businesses have paid over many years. ASIC provided a public update on its website on 20 March 2025, notifying registry users of the issue identified and the regulatory action being taken to address it.