Mr BURKE (Watson—Manager of Opposition Business) (12:00): I thank members of the government for enthusiastically voting for the motion to allow me to speak for 13 minutes! I certainly hope that the repeal day coming up goes better than the last one. The Prime Minister said in his ministerial statement just then that 'our purpose is to look beyond the absurd'. That would have been a valid aim on the last so-called repeal day. Since the last one I have had a chance to go through the costings provided for the savings. The Prime Minister just now referred to a number of global figures for how much will be saved through these bills. Last time we ended up with costings for how much individual acts were contributing, in dollar terms, in red tape reduction. The Amending Acts 1901 to 1969 Repeal Bill 2014 allegedly saved—and it is part of the global total the Prime Minister uses—$210,000. This was the act that repealed a Defence Act, which had a definition relating to a naval officer of a state navy, notwithstanding that the states have not had navies since 1913. It repealed the Defence Act 1909 that, among other things, stipulated that the owner of a mule or bullock required for naval or military purposes shall furnish it for such purposes and the owner may have to register them from time to time. The minister who is at the table, the Minister for Agriculture, will know the extent to which the owners of mules and bullocks have been frightened that— Mr Joyce: It does not take much for a bullock to be frightened. Mr BURKE: That is very good. He knows the extent to which they were frightened the Australian government was going to come in and take their stock for military purposes. It also repealed the Judiciary Act 1914 that made the High Court of Australia a Colonial Court of Admiralty, notwithstanding that Colonial Courts of Admiralty had ceased to exist in 1988. Somehow getting rid of these laws that were redundant, meaningless and had no impact on anyone—so there was no problem getting rid of them; we did not oppose it—adds up to $210,000 worth of savings. I do not know how. I do not know how those numbers get put together, but it makes more sense than when they established $350,000 worth of savings for the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 1). This was the bill that removed hyphens and commas. The purpose of that bill was to remove one comma in the Patents Act and 11 hyphens in various Commonwealth statutes. Where it said 'e-mail' they decided to remove the hyphen and just make it 'email'—obviously on the technical understanding of email, probably from the Attorney-General—and where it said 'facsimile' or 'facsimile transmission' they changed it to 'fax' in 16 pieces of legislation. Somehow this is $350,000 worth of savings. In the way the government is calculating the savings on these bills, when you add it up that would amount to in the order of $10,000 per comma. There is a fair bit of hype going on in the total dollar figures of the savings to business and consumers through these bills. Mr Frydenberg: You belittle the measures and then you question the numbers. How about getting on board? Mr Burke: I hope that the government simply does better than it did last time. The member for Kooyong needs to understand that we are willing him to succeed in this. We just want him to do a good deal better than he did last time. The other test that is often applied here is simply the number of regulations. Since the last repeal day I understand that the government has introduced 600 new regulations. Most of those regulations are good things to do. Simply having a regulation is not a measure of whether you have something stifling business. I give the simple example—and this was supported by the Liberals opposite and opposed by the Nationals opposite—of when we deregulated the wheat industry. When we got rid of the AWB monopoly it was a deregulation measure but it involved more regulations on the statute books than had previously been there. So to simply have the number of regulations as the test does not actually mount your policy case for whether you are providing more freewheeling opportunity for business to avoid unnecessary regulation. That last time the government dealt with this issue they put a number of proposals. We are not arguing that there was not a cost saving to government but we would certainly argue with the merit of the proposals that they had. Last time they claimed savings, more than a quarter—28.3 per cent of the $700 billion—involved the watering down of consumer protections for the Future of Financial Advice reforms and giving a fresh licence for contractors to cut the wages of cleaners through the abolition of the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines. I do not dispute that there were savings there, but they were savings without merit. They were savings that hurt consumers and savings that hurt some of the lowest paid workers in this country. If we get rid of regulations, is it automatically good? Getting rid of redundant regulations is a reasonable thing to do. We got rid of in the order of 16,000 regulations in the time we were in government. Sometimes, as I have said before, the introduction of additional pieces of regulation is of itself a deregulation measure—and the abolition of the AWB monopoly is a perfect example of where something like that was done. I acknowledged that the National Party opposed it. Almost everybody sitting around you, Minister Joyce, supported us on that one, but, as I have acknowledged already, your decision was to oppose us on that. We will wait till we see the legislation in full before we make a decision obviously as to which way we are going to vote. Last time it took some time before the full list of what the government had abolished became clear. Last time, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor was abolished on red tape repeal day; only for the government to later realise that this was something they wanted to put in place; they have since committed to bring it back. So this was a position that existed; there had been bipartisan support for it to exist. On regulation repeal day, they got rid of it. But only shortly after they said: 'Oops! Didn't mean to do that one.' The government acknowledge that simply getting rid of a regulation is not automatically a good thing. Some things are there for national security purposes. Many things are there for consumer protection purposes. Many issues are there for occupational health and safety. There are a range of regulations that are there for a good purpose. That said, if there are regulations that are redundant or if there are ways of streamlining the rules for business, that is a good thing to do. Since the last repeal day, the Prime Minister has boasted about savings—and he referred specifically to the issue of carbon pricing—to households. In the interim, though, we had a budget which put a cost onto those same households and which eclipses the figures that the Prime Minister just provided to the parliament. In the same way, in the interim, we had the government propose for small businesses to be saddled with an avalanche of job applications when the government proposed that job seekers were going to have to put out 40 job applications a month. Not one small business thought that that idea from the government made the other proposals they had in red tape reduction worth it. Small business across my electorate and across the country knew quite clearly that, for all the talk of regulation repeal, what the government was putting in front of them was an avalanche of extra paperwork that they did not want. The government also, in the comments made by the Prime Minister, referred to a number of reforms which have involved putting information onto the internet and providing access to information through various webpages, which are good initiatives. He has referred to the myGov website, which is a good initiative but an initiative that did not begin with the advent of this government. An initiative of people being able to access government services through the myGov website was well and truly set up and well and truly underway under the previous government. The SmartGate system at airports was an initiative started under the Howard government; advanced fully during the years of the Labor government; and continued under this government. For it to be now announced in a ministerial statement by the Prime Minister of Australia as though it is something new, and part of red tape reduction day, when it has been a process going through Australia for near on a decade, is an absurd claim. Similarly, I will concede that what they have said about myTax is true; that is theirs, because they have renamed e-tax, which was available under the Labor government, which was progressively being updated and which would have evolved in its next generation to be exactly what myTax is now. But they wanted to be able to claim that they had one new. So, for three different things that they were doing on the internet, they thought: 'Well, we'll at least rename one of them, because then it will be true that myTax is new'. Yes, that one is new, which does roughly something similar to where the e-tax system was already up to and was continuing to evolve. Labor will work through the legislation when it is introduced, because at the moment all we have is the occasional op-ed from the parliamentary secretary opposite— Mr Frydenberg: Excellent articles! You should read them! Mr BURKE: I do read them. And I will concede that his latest op-ed was better than the previous ones I had read. So they are improving. Mr Frydenberg: You never even did a regulatory impact statement! Mr Joyce interjecting— Mr BURKE: I have a response for the Minister for Agriculture's interjection, but I am holding back. The final thing I will say is that the government makes much of regulatory impact statements, claiming that due process will be followed in cabinet. We have seen in this parliament how quickly all of that falls away the moment there is a deal with the crossbench—for example, look at the future of financial advice reforms. Are we to believe that—in the space of 24 hours, when the new deal was cut—there was a cabinet submission, with a regulatory impact statement attached, to work out what the new cost to the public was, on a change of policy that was being negotiated outside the Senate door? Is that what we are meant to believe? The answer here is quite simple. The government has been willing to ditch any of these processes the moment there is a political deal on the table with the crossbench. We have seen it time and again and we will see it into the future. Getting rid of old regulations is a sensible thing to do. If the government does that, we will continue to support that, as we did last time. But, please, do not trumpet the ordinary work of government as though it is something new and exciting. And, please, do not come into this House—to the members opposite—claiming that they are somehow adding up these global figures, when what they are doing is attaching a dollar figure to hyphens and commas.