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

This federal Labor budget is a disappointment for most and a disaster for many small businesses and family enterprises. The Gillard Labor government has short-changed small businesses and family enterprises by delivering a budget that fails to address any of the key concerns and challenges currently faced by this engine room of the Australian economy. Instead, the budget relies on tricks with smokes and mirrors to claim to be helpful to small businesses, but those tricks are funded by measures that are actually harmful to smaller enterprises.

The claimed cash flow benefit resulting from the instant write-off of the first $5,000 of a new work vehicle requires a small business to spend nearly $34,000 dollars in cash to receive an extra tax benefit worth around $1,275 in 2013, according to the example promoted by the Treasurer. This 'spend a lot to benefit a little' measure does not actually start in this financial year nor in the next; it starts in 2012-13, with a payment possibly arriving in late 2013. It risks delaying vehicle sales and also comes at the expense of over 400,000 of Australia's smallest businesses and self-employed enterprises which are set to lose up to $2,500 by the scrapping of the entrepreneurs tax offset. Changes to vehicle fringe benefits tax, particularly punishing for rural and regional communities, will be leaving small businesses with an additional potential burden of up to $3,000 for providing employees with vehicles, vans or delivery cars of some description—the result of caving in to the Greens' demands to change FBT.

The Gillard government has given with one hand and taken with the other while ignoring the big challenges the small business community was desperate for the government to address. In fact, those challenges have been made worse by this budget. The punishing impact on small business viability and its capacity to employ has been worsened by Labor's flawed carbon dioxide tax. The tax itself, and any detail about it, has been completely left out of the budget, yet this is a real and compelling issue for the small business community. Difficulties accessing affordable credit have also been made worse by a budget which puts upward pressure on interest rates and by Commonwealth borrowings of $135 million a day crowding out small businesses seeking finance. Burgeoning red tape burdens are made worse with new disincentives and punishing reporting requirements for independent contracting and new compliance complexities for employer supplied vehicles—a couple of key areas.

What is it about this government that so leads them to simply hate small business? The government will pocket $365 million from axing an important incentive for the microbusiness community, a tax incentive I touched on earlier, which shows the disdain Labor has for those wishing to pursue their own employment trajectory and livelihoods without being in the traditional employer-employee relationship. The budget scraps the enterprise tax offset. Self-employed people, home based businesses, small retailers, service providers and people using their own wit and entrepreneurship to enter, re-enter, participate in or defer retiring from the workforce will be rewarded by a new tax hit through the scrapping of the ETO.

You hear the Prime Minister talk about the dignity of work and the government's effort of 'insisting on participation of more workers', yet this government has that unionist view that only employees are workers, that if you happen to be self-employed, that if you are actually receiving payment for your services or your work or revenue in your business, that does not count. It is only if you are receiving a pay cheque as an employee that it counts. Through that attitude and the decisions in this budget, an avenue that sees millions of Australians able to support themselves and pursue a livelihood is being made more difficult.

In another area, the Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten has broken an explicit promise not to make it more difficult for those involved in independent contracting and self-employment. He promised, in an article in the Australian Financial Review on 13 October, that he would 'not make life difficult for self-employed working people', yet what the budget announces is another instalment in this Gillard Labor government's concerted and coordinated campaign to hound and harass small-business people out of legitimate contracting arrangements and force them into employee-employer relationships that facilitate union intervention and control. There are two million Australians who derive their livelihood from self-employment and independent contracting. Bill Shorten assured them that he would not make their lives more difficult. He has. He stands condemned. This is yet another example of why only the coalition can support the small business community in Australia. (Time expired)

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