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

They could hoover, but they are actually saying to these small businesses—some with family debts to finance their operations, they use their assets, their houses mortgaged up to the wazoo, their heavy trucks moving goods through their communities—‘On your earnings before interest and tax, we are going to take 40 per cent.’ At a time when small businesses are finding it hard to get finance—another issue on which the small business minister is Marcel Marceau—these small businesses are going to be finding it even harder because the opportunity for them to be profitable, to have enough profit to pay for their financing, is going to be sucked out by 40 per cent by this mining supertax.

What is it about this government and this minister? Why do they keep doing things that disadvantage the small business community? Why do they not speak up on the clear adverse impacts that this mining supertax is going to have on thousands of small businesses right across Australia and on all of their customers?

There are only two possibilities here. The 40 per cent mining supertax on small and family businesses in the quarrying and mining area is going to cause prices to go up—which we put to the minister for housing today and she seemed disinterested or completely unaware about this impact—and the cost will be passed through to consumers at a time when they are deeply troubled by cost of living pressures everywhere. Everywhere you go, small businesses are saying, ‘Customers are very price sensitive; we just can’t push costs on to those people.’ Or, if the government says, ‘No, this mining supertax and its impact won’t be pushed on to the small business customers,’ small businesses are going to suck it up themselves, are they? Are they just going to wear that? They are going to have their viability and prospects for prosperity in their businesses, their opportunity to employ, and their chance to reinvest in their local communities, diminished as the government sucks up 40 per cent of their EBIT just to fill up a hole in their budget.

That is what we are faced with here: damage to consumers and cost increases right through the production chain. I have talked about the impact on building materials and construction materials. I have talked about the impact on local governments that have to get gravel for their roads and the impact of fertilizer production on the agriculture industry in the food that we produce in our country—more input costs there—and even on the sandpits and talcum powder consumers of Australia. But do you hear a word?—no, not a word.

You do not hear a word. There are two possible reasons you do not hear a word. You certainly do not see this fact captured in the political propaganda exercise—$36 million of political propaganda about this mining supertax—and you do not hear even a squeak about this crucial issue for so many small businesses and family enterprises involved in mining and quarrying. There has not been a squeak. Why? Because to say that they are doing this would add to the concerns, fears and outrage that these small business operators have about this Rudd Labor government. And it would also alert the hundreds of thousands of consumers of these products that—directly or indirectly through these minerals and resources being in the production cycle—their costs will go up. It will be one thing or the other.

So the government has deliberately not said anything about it in any of the material that is available—in any of the advertisements—and when constituents of mine ring the Prime Minister’s office and the Treasurer’s office looking for an explanation of this impost on exploration they get the run-around. They end up getting referred to a phone line that no-one answers. So when they are looking for certainty and confidence they get—beep, beep—nothing: no-one at the end of the phone.

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