Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

In the area of tax more than 440,000 small businesses will benefit from changes to entry thresholds for GST and PAYG reporting. That is $63 million worth of compliance savings. In areas of the Corporations Act the silly idea that you need to appoint and retain an auditor for certain corporations that do not actually need to conduct an audit. These are logical and sensible changes. The way in which small business deals with government, the single business service entry point, our work on the Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, moving the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House out of the fog in Medicare, where no small business would think to go, into the ATO. We have seen a 24 per cent increase in the use of that service. Our own contracting—simplifying contract documents. Paying bills on time. If they are too late after 30 days and under $1 million, we should be paying interest because we should not improve the Commonwealth's cash flow off the back of small business. Even in the way businesses deal with each other. The franchise reforms not only improving and strengthening that franchise code but an $8.6 million savings in compliance costs. Fixing the Personal Property Securities Register, fixing the damage of Labor's hashed effort to mess around with employee share streams and streamlining the arrangements of making those within reach of small businesses.

There is more work to do. Labor's own paid parental leave scheme—why do we have to have employers handling those payments twice when the government is already processing those payments and sending them not to the recipient but to a business to double handle under the threat of a fine. Why do that? There is another $48 million worth of savings there. So, while Labor is politicking and making an awful lot of noise, we are tackling pointless, overreaching, economy-clagging regulation. No-one benefits more from that than the small businesses whose job it has been and continues to be the creation of jobs and opportunities and recovering the 519,000 jobs lost in small business under Labor.

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