Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Deregulation, Competition Policy and Sustainable Cities) Share this | Hansard source

He will not raise his voice in support of the small businesses in every corner of this vast continent who will be adversely impacted upon by this tax. He will not stand up for their interests. He will not highlight how the Henry tax review said, concerning a whole category of resources mined by small mining operators, by family business quarries, that we should, ‘Take those resources out of the mining superprofits tax.’ He will not stand up for the businesses that rely on what is extracted by those mining operations, those involved in building materials that use clay and stone. He will not stand up for the farming enterprises which are involved in extracting superphosphate to fertilise our food production in Australia. He will not even stand up for the small children who use the talcum powder extracted by those small operations. He will not stand up for any small business that is damaged by this tax, and they will be damaged quite severely.

This is a government budget built on shifting sand, where the government is going to attack the sand which goes into kids sand pits in order to prop up this budget black hole. That is what is going on here. There will be no children’s sandpits spared from this government’s tax grab as they touch up the mining operators, the small family businesses, on the fringe of metropolitan areas in regions right across Australia which extract that sand. They are not Xstrata. They are not involved in export commodities. They are not involved in humungous profits, which this government wants to tax; they are just going about their business. They are just employing local people. They are supporting the landscapers, the construction industry, they are providing the gravel for the roads and they are getting involved in their local communities—they support the footy club. These are not the huge organisations that Labor would have you believe they are, but you never hear a word about that. You never hear the small business minister talk about their interests.

I am betting that in the next few minutes the Marcel Marceau of small business interests, Dr Emerson, will again not say a word about paid parental leave. He will not say a word about the fact that the Senate will send back to this parliament a Senate position which says, ‘Don’t fit up small businesses with the administration of those schemes.’ You will not see the government support that and you will not see the small business minister stand up for what the small business community wants on paid parental leave; just as you do not hear the small business minister utter a single word about the adverse impacts of this mining supertax on small business involved in the mining sector. You do not hear a word about that. You do not hear a word about the impact and concerns of the cement industry, as Cement Concrete and Aggregates Australia have pointed out—about 80 to 90 per cent of quarried products that are extracted by small enterprises—they currently do not even pay royalties on those things. So we have this idea that we are trying to make sure that royalties are sucked up and somehow compensated for by this great big tax, but what is happening is that this federal Labor government is striking out on these small businesses for more money to fill the black hole in their budget. This is the concern about those people.

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