Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Blair for his question and note that in 1996, when the Labor Party was last in government, unemployment in Blair was 9.4 per cent; today it is 5.2 per cent, and that is a great story. There are 1.9 million small businesses in Australia. The number has grown by 700,00 since 2001 and, encouragingly, the number of small businesses employing people has increased by 31 per cent in the last three years.

We all know that the Labor Party’s job-destroying unfair dismissal laws were a major impediment to small business employing more people, so this morning I picked up the Australian and had a look at this article: ‘Labor won’t turn back IR clock.’ I thought to myself: ‘Wow! This is significant.’ I looked at a key quote from the member for Rankin and it said:

It is small businesses, not political parties, that make the hiring decisions.

I thought: ‘That’s reasonable. Hooray!’ The Labor Party gave me a bit of a hard time in this place when I said that business creates jobs, not government. So finally they are starting to see the light. In the article, the member for Rankin said:

... small business owners could not afford the time or expense of being dragged off to tribunals by ‘ambulance-chasing agents representing frivolous or vexatious claims of unfair dismissal’.

He went on to say:

Such claims were often designed to extract ‘go-away money.’

I said: ‘That’s exactly what we believed.’ We have been saying that for 10 years and, on the 44 occasions that the Labor Party voted in favour of the unfair dismissal laws and against small business, they never said this. I started to choke on my wheaties at this stage.

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