Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Emergency Management) Share this | Hansard source

You might have come up with them in opposition, but you should have made the decisions in government. Of course, you chose not to and you have failed to properly relate to the small business community because in the end—

Mr Billson interjecting—

Yes, there is no doubt you did make small businesses tax collectors under the GST. That is the one thing they remember about you and the Liberal Party when in government. The small business community know they have a government now that is listening to them. Peter Strong, the executive officer of COSBOA, applauded the decision to institute the Small Business Commissioner. There is no doubt that they applauded that. Indeed, other employer bodies have done likewise, supporting the creation of this position. They are also supporting the tax cuts this government is soon to enact. They understand that small businesses in this country have challenges and it is for that reason that this government is providing some support. I think it is really important that the government play a role as an enabler to create the conditions in which businesses can thrive.

If you want some proof of the way the government respond to small business, you need only look at our decision when we were confronted by the global financial crisis. There is no better way to demonstrate the difference in approach between the government and the opposition than when it came to making decisions in relation to the challenges of the global financial crisis. We chose to invest in education and housing and to provide support—

Mr Baldwin interjecting—

Yes, we provided support for people who needed accommodation; yes, we provided support for students across the land who wanted 21st century infrastructure—and why shouldn't they want that? Who were the other beneficiaries of that very important decision? They were the thousands and thousands of small businesses across the country that worked on 27,000 projects—tradies, sole proprietors, independent contractors and small businesses in the construction and maintenance sector, and that flowed on to other sectors of the economy. If you went to an opening of a BER initiative—and I know that many on the other side, having voted against it, turned up to some of those events—if you listened to the small businesses that built those very important amenities for those schools and if you talked to the architects and builders, as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, they said: 'Without these decisions we would have gone to the wall. Without these decisions we literally would not be here today.' That decision by government—

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