Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

The small ones. Why do you reckon they are so confident? Because of the support. It is the support of this government that is engendering confidence in that very important part of the community—the 1.9 million small businesses employing almost four million working Australians. Ms Christina Singh, who is responsible for the Sensis survey, said:

The latest data suggests Australia’s economic environment is starting to rebound, with businesses expecting their operations to perform significantly better in the next 12 months.

So there you go—confidence on the rise.

Consumer sentiment figures were released just a few days ago. What do they show about consumer sentiment? The second largest recorded increase in the last 22 years. So things are on the up. We do have a long way to go. We do need to work in partnership with the small business community, and we will continue to work in partnership with the small business community.

The member for Moncrieff raised in his contribution the issue of modern awards, as if to suggest that all these cost increases that are being claimed have already occurred or that they are inevitably going to occur. He knows and the shadow minister for industrial relations knows that the award modernisation process is a very necessary reform in this country that has been called for for decades by employer groups, large and small. They want to reduce the compliance costs of around 1,600 individual state based, industry based and even business based awards and have only 18 modern awards. He has raised issues about two or three of them. You heard the Deputy Prime Minister talk about what we have done in relation to the restaurant and catering industry, where we have in fact asked the Industrial Relations Commission to have a further look at that. We are in dialogue with others who are affected by the modern awards system. It is a reform to reduce compliance costs, and what do we get? Opposition from the coalition to the award modernisation process.

I remember the then Minister for Industrial Relations coming into this place and saying, ‘Shearers under this award have to be provided with tapioca pudding,’ criticising but never doing anything. That is the problem. The shadow minister for small business for one year and one month has not been able to get a question up through the tactics committee, which is chaired by the member for O’Connor. I saw the member for O’Connor walking around today with a document, which was obviously tactics—

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