The prime minister Tony Abbott says one of his government’s greatest achievements has been cutting red tape, yet none of the repeals have passed through parliament.
As the government prepared to debate the “Red Tape Repeal Day bills” legislation in the house of representatives this week, the package from last year had yet to pass, Labor’s finance spokesman Tony Burke said.
He ridiculed the repeal day bills as “the government’s semi-annual attack on punctuation ... In the past two years, the government has gone to incredible efforts to update spelling and grammar and change punctuation in legislation”, he said.
“To date, the government has claimed red tape savings of $870,000 from three statute law revision bills as part of its red tape repeal days, some of which involve updating spelling, grammar and punctuation,” Burke said.
Revisions included changing “e-mail” to “email” and “facsimile” to “fax”, Burke said.
The three bills removed 40 hyphens, two commas and one inverted comma, changed two full stops to semi-colons and one semi-colon to a full stop, and inserted one full stop, one colon, one hyphen and one comma.
“There’s been lots of fanfare but no real reform from these red tape repeal days,” Burke said.
As the Coalition this week marked two years since forming government, Abbott outlined the government’s successes in a brochure called Sticking to Our Plan, with “reducing red tape” highlighted as a key achievement.
“For the first time, two days of parliament each year are being dedicated to removing government red tape,” the brochure said.
“The government has already cut about 11,000 pieces of regulation and legislation that will reduce paperwork costs by about $2.4bn.”
When introducing the legislation in March last year, Abbott said the package of changes would save businesses and Australians $720m each year and cut 10,000 unnecessary or redundant regulations and acts of parliament.
At the time, opposition MPs questioned the value of the changes.
Parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, Christian Porter, told Guardian Australia the total red tape decisions implemented would be provided at the next “repeal day” on 12 November.
The bulk of the government’s red tape agenda was implemented outside the Omnibus Repeal Bills on repeal days, he said.
“I am surprised that Mr Burke hasn’t better familiarised himself with our successful, comprehensive program to cut red tape throughout the year,” Porter said.
“The red tape agenda is, by any measure, a successful achievement of the Coalition government. The Australian public now deal with less red tape than at any time under the previous Labor government.”
