Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is the shell press release, a template—it doesn’t matter what it is. The Labor Party comes in here with an amendment which has been welcomed by every financial business group and some of the biggest financial operators in this country—AMP, CGT and Barclays Bank have endorsed Labor’s policy—and the Assistant Treasurer, not 15 minutes ago, says that the Labor Party is just dominated by union bosses. Why would he say that, when it has been endorsed by every major business group in this country? He really needs new material. The business community in Australia is looking for more substance than that. You cannot come in here and, during debate on every bill and in every press release, say that this is all about the trade unions, because not everything is. 

He changes the words—sometimes it is ‘union masters’, sometimes it is ‘union task masters’, sometimes it is ‘union bosses’—but the principle is the same. He really needs to get more substance. He needs to start talking about the issues that Labor is setting on the agenda. He needs to start explaining to people why, for example, they do not support a superannuation clearing house, why they do not support BAS Easy, why they do not support the Australian managed funds industry. I say to the Assistant Treasurer: justify your position. Explain why you are not responding to Labor’s agenda and picking up some of Labor’s ideas. You cannot constantly rely on saying that the Labor Party is controlled by the trade unions. You need new material.

There have been a series of reviews in relation to small business regulation and small business tax. This has been going on for some time. Indeed, in 1990 a committee of this House—the Beddall committee—looked at these issues. In 1996, when the current government took office, they appointed the Bell review of small business regulation, presumably in an attempt to meet their commitment to cut red tape for small business by 50 per cent. I have yet to find a small business who thinks their red tape has been cut by 50 per cent over the last 11 years. The member for Rankin may correct me, but I have yet to find one who would say, ‘Yes, the government has implemented that promise.’ It was clearly a non-core commitment.

The Bell review was quite limited in the work it could do. Its terms of reference were to maintain revenue neutrality and to not consider taxation measures. We had a situation where for a long time, under governments of both persuasions, taxation regulation had been identified as the biggest regulatory burden on small business, and the Bell review did not deal with it. But the Bell review did make certain recommendations. Time went by and 10 years later we had the Banks review which, it is fair to say, was like a carbon copy of the Bell review. The Banks review made similar recommendations to the Bell review’s recommendations some 10 years earlier which had not been implemented. There is a lot of rhetoric from the government about small business regulatory reform. There are lots of reports and reviews, but we do not see much change. In fact, we had a situation where a review made similar recommendations to a review commissioned by the same government 10 years earlier. The time for reports has passed. The time for action is here.

This bill contains some sensible measures which we support. We will be voting in favour of this bill. We will also be proposing a second reading amendment which will provide relief to small businesses who are operating under the burden of administrative paperwork created by the GST and the business activity statement. We would invite government members to support that amendment. We would invite government members to join with members on this side of the House in standing up for small business and not walking on both sides of the street. On the one hand they say: ‘We’ve already done it. The Labor Party’s got it wrong; we’ve already done that,’ and, on the other, a couple of weeks later they introduce a similar policy to the Labor Party’s and say that the tax office will discuss with small business the ratio method. We say: let’s introduce the ratio method; let’s have fewer reviews, less discussion and more regulatory reform.

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