Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2026
Senator SHARMA (New South Wales) (19:17): On the morning after the 2025 federal election, the Treasurer, Mr Jim Chalmers, went on national television and made a grand promise to the Australian people. He told the interviewer that, while Labor's first term was 'primarily inflation without forgetting productivity', its second term would be 'primarily productivity without forgetting inflation'.
To signal this newfound economic urgency, the Treasurer hastily convened a productivity summit. Before the ink was even dry on the name badges, though, that was rebadged into the Economic Reform Roundtable. It has now been over a year since that 29-hour talkfest wrapped up and, looking at the state of our nation's economy, it's painfully clear that the Treasurer has managed to forget about both productivity and inflation.
Both have gone terribly south on his watch. That summit was designed to reboot productivity in Australia and to get our economy moving again, supposedly because the chapter on inflation had been closed. We know that's not the case.
Let's just have a look at what our productivity picture is. The Reserve Bank has been forced to downgrade our medium-term productivity growth assumption to just 0.7 per cent per year. It's never been that low.
That's the medium-term outlook. In the short term, the RBA is predicting a further 0.5 per cent reduction in productivity growth just across this calendar year. The latest national accounts figures that came out just last week confirmed that overall labour productivity growth—that's real GDP per hour worked—over the past year was minus 0.2 per cent.
That means that each worker is producing less with the same amount of inputs and with the same amount of time as they were two years ago. Why does this matter? It matters because these aren't just dry economic statistics.
They aren't just for people who keep score of these things. Low productivity or, in fact, zero productivity growth or, even worse, as we've seen in Australia under this government, declining productivity is the direct cause of stagnant real wages. It's the direct cause of persistently high inflation.
It's the direct cause of declining living standards. Let's look at the other part of Treasurer Jim Chalmers's challenge after having said that inflation had been slayed and he was now moving on to productivity. Australia's inflation rate remains stubborn at 3½ per cent.
That's higher than the United States, the United Kingdom, the eurozone, Japan and Canada. Because of high inflation, household budgets are stretched to breaking point. Core inflation, or mean trimmed inflation, has been outside the RBA's target range now for over four years.
For over four years, it's been outside the RBA's target range, which means prices are increasing faster than the RBA is comfortable with, and it's only putting upward pressure on interest rates. We've got inflation over the past four years above the RBA's target range. We've had three interest rate rises so far from the RBA this year trying to get on top of inflation, with all the indications being that a fourth may be coming.
That's what market participants are predicting. We've got a per capita GDP growth that's stagnant. The national accounts showed that per capita GDP growth was stagnant in the last quarter.
That is that the population grew at the same rate as the economy. And we've got real wages—that is people's take-home pay after adjusting for inflation, the fact that they have to pay more on goods—still going backwards. They're still lower now than when Labor came into office.
After that productivity summit last year, I told this chamber that I was none the wiser about what it had actually achieved. Today, I can stand here with absolute certainty and say it has achieved nothing. Productivity is worse than it was when the government convened that roundtable.
Inflation is worse than when the government convened that roundtable. That brings us to the legislation before us today. The coalition will not oppose the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill, because we support practical commonsense measures that cut red tape and streamline government operations.
But let's be very clear about the modest aims that are contained in this bill. This isn't going to get productivity moving again. It will at best remove some small points of friction within the economy.
The bill contains 20 measures across some 25 acts, impacting 19 Commonwealth agencies. Schedule 1 delivers sensible administrative relief, modernising trademarks, plant breeders' rights and customs procedures, so Australian innovators face fewer hurdles getting ideas to market. Schedules 2 and 3 advance a 'tell us once' approach across social security, family assistance and child support legislation—a principle the coalition strongly supports so citizens aren't forced to repeatedly provide the exact same data to multiple departments.
Schedule 4 includes technical fixes, including allowing former ADF personnel with Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation accounts to seamlessly access retirement income products. These are all modest and worthwhile adjustments, but let us be completely honest about what this bill actually is. This is not bold economic reform.
This is not a productivity agenda. This is not Paul Keating mark 2. This is just legislative housekeeping dressed up as a deregulation strategy.
The primary beneficiaries of these changes won't be hard-pressed small-business owners. They won't be families trying to make their sums add up around the kitchen table. They won't be employees.
They won't be young people. They won't be people getting into the housing market. They will overwhelmingly be Canberra public servants who have slightly fewer forms to process.
Worse still is that buried within this modest housekeeping exercise is a measure that fundamentally undermines basic Australian standards of procedural fairness. Part 4 of schedule 2 removes the mandatory legal requirement for the Australian Human Rights Commission to notify an individual when an adverse allegation is made against them in a complaint unless they are formally named as a respondent.
So, under this change, whether an Australian is informed that serious allegations have been lodged against their name and reputation will be left entirely to the subjective discretion of the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Imagine a workplace complaint made about your employer where serious allegations are made about your personal conduct.
You would expect and deserve the basic right to know. That is fundamentally part of the principles of justice and due process—to know the accusations made against you, to know your accuser. But, under this proposed change, you could be left completely in the dark, discovering these allegations months later via a Google search.
Reputations can be ruined by allegations alone, and we have seen far too many instances of the Australian Human Rights Commission's procedures being weaponised by vexatious individuals solely with the aim of harming the reputation of someone with whose political opinion they disagree or with whom they have some sort of personal animosity. In those circumstances, we should not be stripping away these sorts of rights.
What is the government's justification for doing this? To save the Human Rights Commission an estimated 450 staff hours per year. So we're driving productivity in the Human Rights Commission.
This is where the government's productivity agenda has reached—stripping everyday citizens of some of their fundamental basic human rights. That's the price tag that Labor places on procedural fairness: giving people at the Human Rights Commission a slightly easier day in the office. We should never sacrifice fundamental legal protections for citizens simply to save bureaucrats from doing their job.
We should never do that. For that reason, the coalition will be moving two key amendments—firstly, a second reading amendment expressing the Senate's grave concern over this erosion of procedural fairness and referring part 4 of schedule 2, the offending part of this bill, to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for proper parliamentary scrutiny.
Before we fiddle around with people's fundamental human rights, we should at least go through proper deliberative processes that this parliament is designed to carry out. Secondly, the coalition will be moving a substantive amendment in the Committee of the Whole to excise part 4 from the bill entirely and to preserve existing legal protections and safeguards as they are.
Labor and the Greens have so far refused to refer this legislation to a committee. If the government, or the Greens, for that matter, truly believe that weakening natural justice and undermining fundamental procedural protections to save 450 hours of Public Service labour is defensible, they should not fear letting a Senate committee examine it. This bill must be judged against the sheer scale of the regulatory crisis facing our country.
New research from the Institute of Public Affairs reveals that the Commonwealth's red-tape army is on track to exceed 110,000 public servants by mid-2027, an increase of over 19,000 regulatory officers, or 21 per cent, since Labor took office. Taxpayers are now paying out $16 billion annually just to fund the bureaucrats who enforce these regulations, which is up 34 per cent in just four years.
Today, more than half of the total federal Public Service is engaged in roles that involve regulatory activity. In DCCEEW, as it's called, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, regulatory staff levels have more than doubled since 2023. This explosive growth in government bureaucracy is strangling the productive capacity of the Australian economy.
It's making it harder for any small business to operate. It's increasing their compliance costs. It's increasing the share of their payroll that has to go to tasks that are not about servicing a client, winning new business, making a new product or delivering a new service but are solely about meeting the government's demands that are placed upon them.
If you've got an economy where regulation has become strangulation and where the primary purpose of a business is, because of regulation, to serve the whims and needs of the government rather than to serve its customers, then that is a problem. That is why we have seen private sector business failures at a record high in Australia. It's why we've seen economic growth so anaemic.
That is why private sector investment has collapsed. It is why private sector wages are growing slowly—because the growth in regulation is putting a burden all across the economy. Australia now ranks the second worst in the G7 for administrative and regulatory burden.
Federal regulatory compliance costs have ballooned from $65 billion in 2013 to over $160 billion today. That's almost a threefold increase in slightly over a decade. The average small-business owner now spends nearly an entire working day every week—20 per cent of their time—doing nothing but filling out government compliance forms.
The truth is, if you're a small-business owner, you're having to do that late at night, on the weekends or when you should be spending time with your partner or your children or being involved in your community. Instead, you're spending all this time dealing with this compliance burden that the government is placing on you. Forty per cent of small-business operators explicitly state that complex workplace laws and payroll taxes prevent them from hiring new staff.
This is fine for big business. If you're an ASX listed company—if you're an ASX 20—you've got a huge human resources department. You've got a huge office of general counsel.
You've got huge numbers of compliance staff. But if you're a small business—if you're a sole trader, heaven forbid, but even if you're a small partnership or a mum-and-dad operation or a tradie or an accountant—you want to be using all the people that you've got to generate money for the business by selling to customers, by finding new customers, by delivering services, by innovating and by developing new products, rather than devoting one-fifth of your time and one-fifth of your headcount to compliance activities.
Every single hour a business owner spends complying with heavy handed government mandates is an hour they cannot spend investing, innovating, growing, hiring and recruiting, and those compliance costs inevitably flow down to Australian families in the form of higher prices at the check-out, in the form of declining real wages, in the form of higher inflation and in the form of higher house prices.
The construction sector has been one of the worst performing sectors in terms of productivity in the Australian economy—productivity has gone backwards—but it is also the sector that has had to deal with the largest increase in compliance burdens. The National Construction Code has ballooned out to volumes and volumes of the Yellow Pages. If you want to know why productivity is going backwards, look at the compliance burden that's being placed on key sectors.
You cannot regulate your way to higher productivity, and the government cannot continue to expand the administrative state with one hand while claiming to cut red tape with a handful of minor administrative tweaks in the other. That is all this bill is—a handful of minor administrative tweaks that are designed to make the operation of the federal public service in Canberra slightly more smooth, slightly more seamless and slightly easier.
Australia does not need more forms, more regulators or minor legislative tinkering. Australia needs lower taxes, simpler rules, fewer bureaucrats and a government that trusts and backs Australian enterprises to grow. The coalition supports and will always support genuine deregulation that liberates our economy but not bureaucratic housekeeping masquerading as structural reform.
We will support the practical improvements in this bill, but we will fight to protect procedural fairness and people's fundamental human rights and continue demanding the real productivity agenda this country so desperately needs.