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

And if I can illustrate the connection again—which I thought I did, but I will do it again—if you are denied an ABN, you are denied a business name. That then makes how ABNs are allocated and the grounds on which they might be refused incredibly relevant to this bill. I am just touching on the point that, at this time when the government has such poor form about its sustained and coordinated attack, at least three government agencies are going after independent contractors because they operate outside this employer-employee paradigm, which is the only kind of livelihood the government seems to be able to understand. That then can result in people being denied a business name, which then risks triggering the strict liability penalty in the year of trading without a registered business name, so it is incredibly significant. I would like to think that at some time the government will have a realisation that independent contractors are very legitimate as a business and that they make an invaluable contribution to the Australian economy. They are a legitimate way of engaging expertise and talent and recruitment of people for a fixed period of time under quite specific rules about who is a legitimate independent contractor and who is not.

What those independent contractors do not need is yet another coordinated assault on their livelihoods, and on the livelihoods of those they facilitate through their work, by some dodgy use of ABN denial to deny them a business name which makes them in breach of the law if they trade. So I think it is very relevant and a very important point. We know there is a shifty crowd that have organised secret meetings—originally denied by government ministers and subsequently confirmed in Senate estimates—a coordinated strategy between this Labor government and the union movement to conduct an organised campaign against independent contractors. Here there is risk of another point of attack, of the denial of an ABN; therefore the inability to have a business name registered and therefore the risk of strict liability, an offence of carrying on a business that is under an unregistered business name. I think those connections are fairly clear.

In supporting this bill, I have outlined a number of areas where we will maintain a watching brief. There are some opportunities to improve the mechanics, but we should not lose sight of these interconnections between other areas that impact on small business viability and their chance to trade and to participate in the Australian economy because the record of the government in this is not flash, with 300,000 thousand jobs lost in small business since Labor was elected. There is no sign of relief on the radar screen and you can understand the considerable suspicion about what else might be going on as relates to the ABN process of registering a business name.

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