Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I would love to be able to stand up here today and support a motion by the government which pats itself on the back for its support for small business! I would love to be able to do that because I would actually love it to be true. If I thought it was true, as a person who ran my own small business and then ran a trade association for small business for nearly seven years I would love to be able to do that. But, unfortunately, as in so many areas for this government, the rhetoric is profoundly different from the reality.

This notion, this statement that we keep hearing over and over again, about the Abbott government being the government for small business is a fraud. The member for Forde confirmed that in the last lines of his contribution today. He talked about the 23 initiatives of the government. The government has been in office for six months, and the only delivery that he could mention today was improving privacy for the business names register. That is a register, by the way, which used to be six registers until quite recently—until the Labor government combined them into one, significantly reducing the red tape and cost burden for small business. The improvement to privacy is a very important improvement made by the government, but that is it. The rest of what the member for Forde talked about today, particularly at the end, was about commitments: 'We've made commitments to the electorate of Forde.' But let us look at what they have actually done.

The member for Forde talked about the concessional loans for businesses affected by the natural disaster—the fires in the Blue Mountains that happened just after the election. On this side of the House we screamed as loud as we could about those concessional loans, because in October, November and December they still did not exist. Businesses were struggling in the Blue Mountains through October, November and December after one of the worst natural disasters they had seen in that region. A nice promise—no delivery.

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