Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2026
Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (18:57): I rise in support of the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2026 and foreshadow a second reading amendment in my name. The bill makes a series of positive changes. The introduction of 'tell us once' reporting, the streamlining and the technical corrections each take something off the time businesses lose to administration.
But it's important to see this bill in the context of the broader regulatory environment. Less than 12 months ago, we passed the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2025. That bill was directed towards similar ends, but what I hear from ACT small businesses is a story of increased regulatory burden.
The trend towards more regulation of small businesses doesn't seem to have turned. A few weeks ago I travelled to Sydney to attend the COSBOA National Small Business Summit in Darling Harbour. Many of the small businesses and their representatives told me just how hard it is to deal with the regulatory burden placed on them.
One of the things we don't talk about enough in this place is that small-business owners are getting smashed twice at the moment. Like almost all Australians, they have a mortgage or are paying rent themselves. They have to put food on the table, and they're seeing the prices go up.
They have home and contents insurance, and they're seeing the prices go up there. They're experiencing everything that all of us are experiencing. Then, in their small business, they are in an economy where more and more Australians are tightening their belts and spending less.
They are being squeezed at the moment. They're ending up spending hours and hours of often unpaid time on the weekends or late at night dealing with regulations. Following these conversations, I started to look at work that has been done on this issue, and I would like to suggest to colleagues that they may wish to read an article from the Chair of the Productivity Commission, Danielle Wood titled 'The red tape impulse', published in the long-form policy magazine Inflection Points.
The Productivity Commission has counted more than a doubling of restrictive terms in legislative instruments since 2006. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has found that the cost of complying with Commonwealth regulation has jumped from $65 billion in 2013 to $160 billion this year. This bill does little to reduce those ballooning costs.
I want to be very clear: regulation is necessary. Most regulation exists because somebody learned something the hard way. We need to be careful about saying that all regulation is bad.
Clearly we need regulation to protect Australians and ensure that they know that the food that they're eating is what is on the label. The same goes for medicines they have. There is a whole range of other areas where we clearly need these protections in place.
My concern is that the human instinct to regulate is strong and at times misdirected. More than that, regulatory effort is not often directed towards where it does the most good and is not about whether the businesses affected most heavily are the ones that should be. Consider who carries the burden of regulation now.
A business with four staff has no compliance manager. When a new obligation arrives, the person filling in the form is the same person who was going to do the rostering, chase the invoices and open up in the morning. The paperwork is written as though it costs everyone the same, and it costs the smallest operators the most.
In conversations with ACT small businesses, the frustration comes back to the amount of time spent on compliance. Nobody objects to being held to a standard. They object to waiting months to learn whether or not they have met it, all while continuing to pay costs.
Now consider Canberra households dealing with companies at the other end of the scale—big businesses. Here in Australia we have an economy that is made up of incredibly concentrated sectors—duopolies and the big four. We don't have enough competition in this country.
Clearly the parliament needs to shoulder some of the blame for the way that decisions have been made, over many decades now, that favour these companies and that have allowed the status quo to not just continue but see the concentration of market share and, in some cases, the blatant price gouging of Australians. Let's come back to the Canberra household who has to get their car insured.
Car insurance premiums have risen by about 50 per cent in six years. When ASIC examined 320 renewal documents covering roughly seven-tenths of the market, it found insurers' explanations for those rises in generic language tucked away in supplementary documents, and it found that customers who rang up and pushed back got a lower price nearly a third of the time—the loyalty tax that we see too often in Australia.
ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland put it plainly: There is no upside to loyalty. The household that stays put and pays on time is quietly charged more for doing so. Let's go to the airline industry.
Take Jetstar, which from February next year will include one underseat bag in the fare and charge separately for the overhead locker. It's 33 bucks for the pleasure of taking a carry-on bag between Sydney and Melbourne and on a Melbourne to Tokyo booking, checked by the Guardian Australia, it's 86 bucks to take a bag over and $108 to bring it home. Of course, fares aren't going down to match, so the advertised price is no longer the real cost price of the trip.
And parliament just sits here and allows this to happen. We saw this through the airline inquiry—the allegations of slot hoarding, the conduct of Qantas. Qantas, in reply, was saying: 'Well, it's actually an incredibly competitive market.
We just happen to pocket 80 per cent of the profits here in Australia in this incredibly competitive market.' This contrast between large businesses and small businesses is alarming. A business with four staff must prove itself repeatedly to a variety of government agencies, while a company with millions of customers can lift a premium by half without explaining why.
The people inside that system are not indifferent to this. The incentives point the other way. A minister who announced a new program has something to show at the end of the year, while an official who spends 12 months untangling overlapping requirements has an absence of regulation to point to.
At the moment, nobody's measuring absences. The member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, made much of this case in the House and moved a second reading amendment to this bill. I want to acknowledge that work.
My second reading amendment builds on one the member for Wentworth put forward in the other place. It asked the government to develop and implement regulatory reduction targets and strategies, to make senior officials and departments accountable for deregulation, to strengthen the Office of Impact Analysis and give it greater independence, and to fund the National Productivity Fund at a level that could repeat what national competition policy achieved in the 1990s.
The government has identified the right problem. I'm asking it to be measured against that problem rather than just returning to this place with another bill next year and the year after that and our continuing to talk about easing the regulatory burden. Reports from the ground say that that is not happening.
In fact, we're heading in the other direction where we're just constantly adding regulations that are almost always, you could argue, very well-meaning. But it's a burden for those who have to deal with it. I think there will be a real consequence of our failure as a parliament if we don't start to grapple with this issue—not just by talking about it but by actually removing unnecessary regulatory burden.
I want to end by congratulating the government on a commitment made in this year's budget. In the budget, a commitment was made to reduce regulatory burdens by $10.2 billion each year. That is a strong commitment.
I very much welcome it. I thank them for it, but it obviously has to be backed by action. It's the government's responsibility to reduce the regulatory burden on small businesses and make sure consumers are protected from the bad practices of large businesses in concentrated markets that clearly lack competition.
I will keep pushing to get this done.