Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because you are right: there is no point of order. Perhaps when the member has a bit more experience in this place he will understand that. But the reality is that, just as the government walked away from workers in South Australia, you are doing the same thing in Tasmania. You have walked away from public servants and you are shifting them from Tasmania straight back across to the mainland. That will not help in Tasmania. You are a government of three years, so start acting like a government. Start laying out the proper plans. Instead of saying you have the lowest qualifications and the lowest of this and the lowest of that, come in here and talk about the positive plans, because I do not see too many positive plans contained in this.

As I said, this is a government that is wracked by confusion. Government members will come in here with their confected anger and they will carry on about a range of things, but let me tell you something else that we did in government: we looked after low-paid workers, particularly women. There are two million women in Australia who are paid less than $37,000 a year, and they got a very important bonus through their superannuation, called the low-income superannuation contribution. Many of those are in Tasmania, and that is what is most upsetting about this: when you rip that away from these people, you rip it away from the Tasmanian economy. You rip it away from the people who need it the most.

When it comes to private sector jobs, let me tell you about a lot of the things that Labor did in government, particularly for small business. We injected more than $5 billion worth of direct assistance. I went and visited Tasmania and held some small business forums around some of these issues, and there were a lot of complaints and a lot of different issues, but I tell you what: we were there with money on the table, $5 billion worth of direct assistance, from which Tasmania benefited directly. But when the coalition comes to power what does it do? It rips that away. I want to see someone explain to me how $5 billion less in the small business world can directly help. There was the uncapped, unlimited $6,500 in direct assistance with the instant asset write-off.

I would like to see how that is explained to Tasmanian businesses when they go to write a cheque and are about to buy a piece of equipment and they realise that that piece of equipment is no longer covered and they will not get that direct assistance. Tasmanian small businesses will be directly worse off to the tune of real dollars, and they will make an economic decision. They will say, 'Well, we might just hang off on buying that piece of equipment or employing that extra person.'

But the Tasmanian state government, on the other hand, has actually taken direct action, unlike the direct action that has been taken by the coalition government now, which is to rip money out, rip out superannuation, rip a whole heap of things out of that economy, rip out the Public Service jobs, rip out public sector jobs—

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