Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for choosing wisely on what is the most important agenda item for today. It is particularly relevant today, because we have another new Minister for Small Business. There have been four Labor government small business ministers in just 14 months: Nick Sherry, Mark Arbib, Brendan O'Connor and now Chris Bowen. This is the minister, of course, who was appointed to stop the boats. Unfortunately he was a dismal failure, with record arrivals.

Let us hope for small business's sake that he is not just as unsuccessful when it comes to reviving the fate of Australia's small businesses.

Every one of Labor's small business ministers has presided over a small business sector that has got smaller and less profitable and has employed fewer people. Small business is being crushed by Labor’s burden of red tape and regulation, by its restrictive workplace laws, by the Fair Work Act, which is anything but fair to small business employers, and by high taxes and higher costs. They are squeezed on one hand by big business, like the Woolworths, Coles, Bunnings and Harvey Normans of the world, and on the other hand by the internet traders, who have much lower costs and are able to seize more and more of their market share.

The reality is that small business is struggling. Small business is battling right across the nation. As I and my colleagues have travelled around and visited flood and fire ravaged communities, we have spoken to many small businesses who need to rebuild their shop or to clear the mud out so that they can commence trading. Sadly, many of these businesses, these farmers and manufacturers, have said they do not think they have a capacity to recover. It is not that they do not have the skills; it is not that they are not good at their business; it is just that the burden of regulation, the burden of higher taxes, the lack of support from this government and the power of heavy-handed union officials have made it all not worth the trouble. They do not have the will or the enthusiasm to try to get over this crisis, because they know there will be another one ahead just around the corner as long as this government is in office.

Small business is crying out for Labor’s high tax and high debt and its regulation monkey to be lifted from their backs. Labor’s forgotten families and forgotten small businesses are constantly facing higher costs and higher taxes, and the government does not seem to appreciate that people in small business do not have the capacity to simply pass that on to millions of customers who are waiting at their door. They have to work very hard for their business. They cannot afford to increase their costs because there are competitors, big competitors, and people with lower costs operating from overseas in Australia who can seize market share so that small businesses become less competitive.

Small business is often referred to as the engine room of the Australian economy. Under Labor’s mismanagement the engine has stalled. That is one of the factors that is bearing heavily on the enthusiasm and the optimism of Australians as they face the current economic difficulties. In small business, job losses are mounting and job security is simply a pipedream for many employees as well as their employers. The number of job advertisements has fallen for 11 consecutive months now, 11 months in a row. The ABS retail sales figures out today show that retail sales fell again in December. As a nation, we have stopped playing to our strengths. We have stopped looking after the engine in our economy. Labor is not prepared to back small business. Instead, they are out with their Greens and so-called Independent mates vilifying these businesses and industries that have made Australia great over a century—our miners, farmers, manufacturers, tourism operators and power generators. Small businesses are being vilified in the name of green dogma, union power and tax binges from this government. Their costs are increasing and the skids are being put under the millions of Australian jobs that they create.

The Australian Industry Group’s performance of manufacturing index this month shows manufacturing in decline for the 11th straight month. This government claims it supports manufacturing, yet the industry has been in decline for 11 months in a row. At least 110,000 jobs have been lost in Australian manufacturing since 2008. Manufacturers are paying over the odds for material costs because of the high Australian dollar and they are being told to just eat the extra cost of the carbon tax. It does not matter that they have got to bear a cost that none of their competitors have to face while they are trying to stay afloat against cheaper global competition. The abattoirs are up for $250,000 or $500,000 extra on their freezer bills. There are small communities that depend on these industries. They are often the biggest employer in town, yet they are being faced with more and more tax. What about the people in the hospitality sector—those trying to serve meals out of hours or to keep a coffee shop open on the weekend—and the lack of flexibility in the so-called Fair Work Act? It is quite clear that union domination has been allowed to prevail over common sense. The union bosses would prefer people to have no pay packet at all rather than an affordable wage.

The small businesses that my colleagues and I have visited are simply dismayed and depressed. They do not know where to go. These people have taken great pride in what they do, in what they have built up for themselves, their families and their country. They take pride in their ability to employ people and to make a contribution to their local community. Yet they have been pilloried, persecuted and vilified by this government. The overriding instinct under Labor is not how they can grow and employ more people; it is how they can hit them next. How can we find another tax to impose upon these people? This is an incompetent government that does not want to understand the needs of these people or their lack of capacity to insulate themselves, or their lack of capacity to insulate themselves, from these taxes. That is the antithesis to the business culture that we want and need to cultivate in this country.

The coalition has a plan to help small business to provide more jobs, better jobs and jobs with security.

Unfortunately, the Labor Party is so preoccupied with arguing about its own jobs, and particularly the Prime Minister's job, that it is not interested in what is happening to small business and the people who work to keep this economy strong. Our job in government should be to make it easier, not harder, for business to be more productive and to grow and employ more Australians.

Our priorities as a coalition will be to provide a stronger and more prosperous economy that delivers new jobs, higher wages and better services for families. We have done it before. The Howard government created 2.4 million jobs, oversaw a 21 per cent increase in real wages and saw Australian families almost triple net household wealth. Now, in an era of dwindling job opportunities and high costs and intense insecurity, bizarrely the Prime Minister is telling Australians they do not pay enough tax. After 27 new taxes she is looking around for more ways to make industry and employers in Australia less profitable. This is the highest spending government in Australian history. This year they will receive $70 billion more than in the last budget of the Howard government. They are spending $100 billion more. Their revenue is up. The government keeps talking about decline in revenue. It may not have been as much as they predicted a few months ago, but it is still more than they had last year. Labor's problem is not a revenue problem; it is a spending problem—their complete inability to keep their expenditure under control.

Another myth that Labor likes to perpetuate is that somehow or other interest rates have been lower under its government than under the Howard government. That is simply untrue. The real average interest rates paid by homeowners and small business borrowers were lower under the coalition government than they have been under Labor. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia, average small business overdraft rates were 8.89 per cent under the coalition government, from March 1996 to November 2007, compared with 10.16 per cent under Labor between December 2007 and January 2013. Labor is simply not telling the truth when it says that interest rates are lower. Small business knows what they are paying and they are paying a lot more under Labor than they did under the previous government. Indeed, for a typical small business unsecured overdraft loan of $200,000, the difference between the coalition government and Labor has been $2,540 a year or $212 a month.

In reality this government has been a burden on small business and it has sought to make those burdens even worse. The minister challenged me to name an example of the way the government has imposed additional tax on small business. You need to go no further than the carbon tax. Any small business that has complained about the carbon tax has been vilified by the government and told they can simply pass it on to their consumers. You can simply pass it on and the people will pay. They are all getting compensation. Everybody is better off. The reality is that this is a business burden that Australians are paying and that our competitors are not—$23 per tonne penalty for carbon emissions. That goes up on 1 July and again on 1 July next year. Last week the European carbon price dropped below $3. It is down to $2 in New Zealand, but we are paying $23. Ironically, the EU price jumped up to $6 later on the news that Germany is going to open up a lot more coal fired power stations. The price of carbon went up in Europe because they are going to build more coal fired power stations. What is the logic of what this government is doing? It is simply imposing burdens on this country—the highest carbon price in the world—to make small business in Australia less able to be competitive.

When the Howard government left office the ABS estimated that 5,061,000 people were employed by Australian small business—51.3 per cent of the private sector workforce. By June 2009 the ABS reported small business job losses of more than 300,000 under Labor and a decline in the private sector workforce employed in small business to 48 per cent. The reality is that since this government came to office there are 14,500 fewer small businesses employing Australians. This government has no interest in the plight of small business and it does not seem to be prepared to do anything to help.

On 13 January this year the current Prime Minister matched her predecessor's record of 935 days in the Lodge. Remember that she said that she had to knife the previous Prime Minister because Labor had lost its way and our country needed new direction. As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ran up $42 billion in net debt, the current Prime Minister has taken it to $147 billion in net debt. Under the previous Prime Minister electricity went up 34 per cent, under this one an average 41 per cent. Under Kevin Rudd gas prices rose 26 per cent, under this Prime Minister 29 per cent. Kevin Rudd promised to be a fiscal conservative, but he delivered three budget deficits. The current Prime Minister, after promising more than a hundred times that this budget would be balanced, has also now abandoned that promise. She, like Kevin Rudd, will go down in history as never delivering a budget surplus.

This is the kind of government that is burdening Australian small business at the present time. Our plan to create a million new jobs starts with scrapping the carbon tax, which is a major cost on small business. We will cut red-tape burdens on small business by a billion dollars a year and we will create a no-nonsense one-stop shop for environmental approvals. These are the right priorities at the right time for Australia. We will make a difference—(Time expired)

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