Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2026

Senator DEAN SMITH (Western Australia) (18:33): I rise to speak on the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2026. The coalition will not oppose this bill. Reducing red tape and unnecessary regulation is something the coalition strongly supports.

Good regulation protects Australians, but excessive and complex regulation increases costs for businesses and households. It slows down investment, discourages innovation and makes it harder for businesses to employ and grow. Reducing red tape isn't about removing safeguards.

It's about making sure regulation serves the public interest efficiently without imposing unnecessary costs and burdens on Australians. The truth is that Australia doesn't have a good story to tell when it comes to the regulatory burden we impose on business. Australia's administrative and regulatory burden is the second highest in the G7, behind only Japan, and we rank 37th out of 43 OECD countries for administrative and regulatory burden.

Small businesses spend almost a full day every week dealing with compliance requirements, with 40 per cent of small-business owners saying the impost of payroll tax and workplace laws has stopped them from hiring staff. According to the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the cost to businesses of complying with federal regulation has risen from $65 billion in 2013 to $160 billion today.

At the same time, productivity has fallen by more than five per cent under this Labor government. If we are serious about lifting productivity and improving living standards, reducing unnecessary regulation must be part of the solution. That is why the coalition welcomes sensible measures contained in this bill.

We also need to be honest about what this bill actually delivers. The government says the bill supports its work to build an economy that is more dynamic, more resilient and more productive for all Australians. This bill is a step towards simplifying and removing some unnecessary regulation, but it is only a small step.

The bill includes 20 measures, amending 25 acts, repealing two acts and affecting 19 Commonwealth agencies. There are worthwhile administrative improvements throughout it. Schedule 1 includes amendments to simplify business regulation, including reforms to trademarks, plant breeders rights, reporting requirements and customs administration.

The changes to trademarks and plant breeders rights will reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and make it easier for Australian businesses and innovators to protect their ideas and bring new products to market. The bill also improves the efficiency of Australia's trade remedy system, with faster decisions and refunds providing greater certainty for businesses.

The extension of time between gender equality target cycles will also reduce the administrative burden on employers. Schedule 2 contains measures to streamline regulation, including modernising administrative processes in social security, family assistance and child support legislation. It also repeals two acts that are now redundant.

That is sensible housekeeping, but it's hardly the kind of reform that will materially change the lives of Australian businesses or shift the productivity dial. Schedule 3 supports the government's 'tell us once' approach. This is a concept the coalition supports.

In fact, it was an approach the coalition announced in the last parliament. Australians should not have to repeatedly provide the same information to different government agencies. Government agencies should work together and make better use of information that Australians have already provided.

These measures reduce duplication, improve service delivery and make interactions with government simpler and less frustrating. That is the type of practical deregulation the coalition supports. Schedule 4 contains largely technical amendments.

One measure provides eligible former ADF members with a current Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation membership with the option to access a retirement income product through CSC. This is a good measure. It gives relevant former ADF members the option to access a retirement income product through their existing superannuation administrator rather than having to access a product from another administrator.

There are sensible measures contained in this bill, but ultimately the contents of the bill are relatively minor in nature. They are not the kinds of reforms that will materially reduce the regulatory burden facing Australian businesses. In practice, many of these changes will make life easier for government agencies more than they will materially reduce the regulatory burden facing Australian businesses, and that is the broader problem with Labor's approach to deregulation.

Australia needs a much more ambitious productivity and deregulation agenda than this bill delivers. While the government is making modest changes to administrative processes, the size of the regulatory burden and the bureaucracy behind it continues to grow. New research from the Institute of Public Affairs shows the federal government's red-tape army is set to grow to more than 110,000 staff by the end of the 2027 financial year.

That is more than 19,000 additional regulatory staff—a 21 per cent increase since 2023. The cost to taxpayers of employing these regulatory staff will reach approximately $16 billion in 2027. That's an increase of $4.2 billion, or 34 per cent, since 2023.

More than half of the total federal government workforce is now engaged in regulatory activity. The Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water portfolio is projected to have the fastest growth in regulatory staff, increasing by 14.6 per cent in just one year and more than doubling since 2023. Previous research from the Institute of Public Affairs shows federal red tape increased by 88 per cent between 2005 and 2023, growing two-thirds faster than the national economy over the same period.

That is the scale of Australia's red-tape problem. More bureaucrats are creating and enforcing more rules while Australian businesses are spending more time and money complying with them. Every hour a business spends dealing with unnecessary regulation is an hour it cannot spend investing, employing, expanding or increasing productivity.

Those costs ultimately flow through to Australians through higher prices, lower investment and fewer employment opportunities. You can't regulate your way to higher productivity. The government's response cannot simply be to make a few administrative processes easier while continuing to expand the bureaucracy responsible for creating and enforcing regulation.

Australia needs fewer rules, fewer forms, fewer regulators and less red tape. And that brings me to the one measure in this bill that the coalition does have serious concerns about. Part 4 of schedule 2 removes a procedural fairness safeguard enacted by the parliament in 2017.

It removes the requirement for the Australian Human Rights Commission to notify a person when an adverse allegation is made about them in a discrimination complaint if they are not formally a respondent. Under the proposed changes, whether that person is informed will depend on the president's discretion rather than a clear legal requirement. We have a simple question about this measure: why should a person not be told when serious allegations have been made about them?

Allegations can still damage a person's reputation, even if there are no legal consequences. They can concern a person's conduct. They can form part of a complaint being considered by a statutory body, and the person who is the subject of those allegations should at least have the opportunity to know that those allegations have been made.

Imagine a colleague makes a complaint about your employer to the commission and names you in that complaint, making allegations about your behaviour. You would want to know about that. The coalition believes that you would definitely want to know about that and that you should be advised.

But, under this change proposed in this bill by this government, there is a chance that you wouldn't. You could discover, through a Google search of your own name, that you had been named in a complaint. That is a real risk from this change.

Why is this safeguard being removed? Because the commission estimates it can save approximately 450 staff hours a year. Think about that—450 hours.

That is the justification for weakening a procedural fairness safeguard. Administrative convenience should not come at the expense of procedural fairness. This measure is about reducing paperwork for public servants at the expense of processes that matter to Australians who rely on them for their protection.

Fairness requires that people are informed when allegations concerning them are raised, and this is precisely the kind of change that deserves proper parliamentary scrutiny. This is precisely the kind of change that deserves sound, proper, full parliamentary scrutiny, noting it was an initiative that was put into the law by this parliament in 2017. Yet, when the coalition raised these concerns, Labor and the Australian Greens refused to refer this bill to a Senate committee for further inquiry.

That is tremendously disappointing. If the government is confident that this change is justified, it should have no objection to allowing the parliament to properly examine its consequences. The coalition will move three amendments in relation to part 4 of schedule 2.

We'll move a second reading amendment to express our concern that replacing a mandatory notification requirement with a discretionary power diminishes procedural fairness for people who are the subject of adverse allegations. It also seeks to refer part 4 of schedule 2 to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry, with a reporting date of 9 September.

This is a modest and reasonable request. Where the government is proposing to remove a procedural fairness safeguard, the parliament should have the opportunity to properly examine the consequences. We'll also move a substantive amendment to remove part 4 of schedule 2 from the bill, as well as an amendment that would partially repeal Labor's ban on self-managed super funds using limited recourse borrowing arrangements to purchase a new residential property.

The amendment also changes the definition of 'business real property' to 'commercial property' to enable SMSFs to invest in mixed-use properties and support even more housing supply. This is a modest amendment that will fix Labor's failure to distinguish between new and existing homes when it struck its deal with the Greens to ban SMSFs from investing in residential property to secure the passage of their toxic taxes.

According to industry, these changes would help unlock up to 22,000 new dwellings each year. At a time when Australia is facing a housing crisis, the government should be doing everything it can to boost housing supply, not reducing it simply because it needs the Greens votes to pass legislation. The coalition is not seeking to obstruct the worthwhile reforms contained elsewhere in this bill.

We are seeking to preserve a procedural fairness safeguard that should not be removed simply because the commission considers the existing processes to be administratively inconvenient. There is an important distinction between removing burdensome bureaucracy and removing safeguards that protect accountability and fairness. The coalition supports sensible deregulation.

We support reducing unnecessary red tape. We support making it easier for Australians and Australian businesses to interact with government. There are measures in this bill that achieve those objectives, but Australia needs much more than this.

At a time when Australia's productivity challenge is becoming more acute, Australians should expect more than legislative housekeeping dressed up as regulatory reform. They should expect a government that tackles the regulatory burden that is holding back business investment and productivity. They should expect a government that reduces the number of rules that businesses have to navigate, the number of forms they have to fill out, and the number of regulators they have to deal with.

They should expect a government that understands that every hour spent complying with unnecessary regulation is an hour that could instead be spent investing, employing and growing. The coalition will support sensible regulation, but we will not support removing safeguards that protect accountability and fairness. This bill contains some worthwhile reforms, but it also highlights the limits of Labor's approach to regulatory action.

Australia needs a more ambitious agenda for deregulation, productivity and economic growth, and that is an agenda the coalition will continue to pursue. With those remarks, I commend the bill to the Senate. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Sterle ): Senator Smith, before you sit down, are you going to move the second reading amendment?

Senator DEAN SMITH: I move the second reading amendment on sheet 3953: At the end of the motion, add ", and: (a) the Senate: (i) notes that Part 4 of Schedule 2 to the bill removes a procedural fairness safeguard enacted by Parliament in 2017, (ii) expresses its concern that replacing a mandatory notification requirement with a discretionary power diminishes procedural fairness for persons who are the subject of adverse allegations; (iii) is of the opinion that the Parliament should not weaken procedural fairness protections without compelling justification and proper parliamentary scrutiny, and (iv) notes that Labor and the Australian Greens refused to refer the bill to a Senate committee; (b) Part 4 of Schedule 2 to the bill (removing adverse allegation notifications) be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 9 September 2026; and (c) further consideration of the bill be made an order of the day for the first sitting day after the committee has reported".