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

Can't you tell the difference between attacking a hopeless Labor opposition with no plan for the future, only running lines your the unions fed you and the interests of this country? Can't you work that out? As the member for Gorton leaves, what a surprise, he has failed to mention small business once. He may have only been the minister for 11 months. I accept he may have been the only Labor minister in the previous government for 11 months. He was only one of six. I should not be too harsh. I should not think he actually understands that the task of job creation rests in the hands of those that are creating the economic opportunities. It is a pretty simple idea. Jobs do not come by just by coming here and running a picket line speech. It is about supporting the productivity of our economy, getting behind the wealth creators, understanding that for someone to gain a job there has to be an employer with the capacity to employ them and pay for them. And that is why enterprise needs to be at the heart of any credible agenda that talks about the future economy and where the jobs are going to come from. That is what this budget was all about.

I am not surprised those opposite could not quite pick up the fact that we are energising enterprise through this budget, that jobs and small business were at the heart and that supporting participation, families and child care are all about putting in place the environment and infrastructure that is needed to create employment opportunities in this economy. To have people prepared and able to take up those opportunities and to have a go to make them their own is what this budget was about—a challenge we faced after inheriting the mess and their debt and deficit legacy of Labor.

It is a difficult assignment trying to deal with the hard wired expenditure that Labor had in the budgets and in the books of the Commonwealth that would see $123-billion worth of deficits if we left it on the set-and-forget Labor plan. But we could not do that because you do not create jobs for the future by giving our kids the debts that we were not prepared to pay today. That is no way of opening up the economy for the future. So not only does this budget deal with new initiatives designed to support the job creation and the economic prospects of the economy but we have more than offset those outlays by finding savings within the budget.

What else have we done? We have reduced the deficit as a percentage of GDP in our economy by half a per cent each year in the out years. We are back on track for a credible budget recovery that is what the markets are looking for. All of this is happening while we present to the Australian public a jobs and small business plan, a family and child care support strategy. It is all about energising enterprise, encouraging people to be a part of the economy and to be in a position to take up those jobs that, through the work we are doing as a government in partnership with the private sector, will be available in increasing numbers into the future.

Why am I so optimistic about that? In the first year of the Abbott government, the job creation rate by this economy was three times what it was under the last year of Labor. We had three times the rate of job creation. We have got record numbers of business formation. We have got momentum heading in the right direction and all Labor can do is ignore the history as if it never existed. Have a look at Labor's last budgets. Have a look at the debt trajectory that is in there, understated and fraudulent though it was. In there, have a look at the slowing in economic opportunity. Have a look at the rising rates of unemployment. All of those settings were created and put in place under Labor's administration. When the Australian public said enough is enough of that ridiculously dysfunctional government of Labor and put the coalition in office, we had to start with where Labor left things. And let me assure you, they were not where anybody wanted them to be.

In small business, 519,000 jobs—livelihoods, the opportunity for people to get a go in the workforce—provided by small business were lost under Labor, in six years under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. Do you know that the number of small businesses actually employing people declined? It declined. Labor seemed to go out of their way, as an assault on the small business economy, to take on those enterprising men and women who mortgage their houses and in some cases think of nothing other than what they can do to support their enterprise.

We had to tackle that, and we have. Job creation is at a rate that Labor could only dream of. In business formation, again, there are encouraging signs. Building approvals are up. There is confidence in consumers. We had to recover from Labor. I admit that the Australian public was ecstatic when Labor was voted out of office. I accept that. The Australian public was ecstatic, and some of those confidence ratings went through the roof, such was the jubilation of the Australian public when Labor left office.

Yes, it has come off those heights of jubilation, but you hear Labor talking down the economy. They are optimism sponges. They are the perpetrators of negativity. They do not talk about policy. Right throughout the member for Gorton's speech, did you hear one policy idea? Wasn't this Labor's year of big ideas? I have an idea for Labor. Why don't they just get out of the road? Get out of the road. Let us implement the plan that has been articulated in the budgets. Let us get on with repairing the debt and deficit disaster that has been left, not just for governments. Governments have to contend with them; citizens have to pay for them. If we are going to achieve our potential as a great nation and carry forward the promise that every generation before us has had that the next generation will have it better than us, we cannot leave those settings where Labor had them and where Labor wants them: 'What we'll do is steal those opportunities from our kids. We will load up the economy and enterprising people with more debt and lead in the saddlebag than they need to contest and win the economic opportunities of the future.'

What are we doing? We are opening those doors. Those North Asian trade agreements—hundreds of millions of new prospective customers wanting what we do well; a chance to grow our business and our economy and the jobs that flow from it. That is what we are doing. And then we are making sure that our economy is best equipped and fit to win those opportunities, because they are contested; they are not reserved for us. They are not something you can protect by a picket line performance like you saw from the member for Gorton.

Tonight will be interesting. Will Labor have anything positive or constructive to say? Will they dwell on name-calling, on semantics and on the use of words that they seek to distort to create division in the society but no clear pathway for where the economy and this nation are going? That will be the test, because we have already seen some examples of it. Do you know that last week—I think it is the shadow, assisting, part-time, occasionally, about-to-be-retiring—Bernie Ripoll, the member for Oxley, put out a press release? He was having a crack, having a go, not in a positive sense but having a go at our plan to provide tax relief to small business. He was bagging it. He was playing from the big-end-of-town rule book. He was saying, 'Well, if it can't go to everybody, it shouldn't go to anybody.' Well, that is not our view. We do what we can in a responsible and affordable way.

So you had the member for Oxley bagging the idea of a tax cut. You had the current opposition Treasury spokesman, who I must confess was the small business minister—let me check it. One and a half months he lasted in that role. He would not have even got his cards printed in time. He was out there saying, 'No, I actually think this isn't such a bad idea.' And then you had the Leader of the Opposition doing the corridor talk. In fairness to the Leader of the Opposition, I try to ignore a lot of the corridor talk about him from his own colleagues. I do not think it is really helpful. But he had a corridor chat, and he thought he might be onside with some of these small business measures.

But have we got any clarity? Are they actually going to back this measure? Are they going to support our efforts to energise enterprise, to give a reward and incentive to those courageous men and women who create wealth and opportunity not only for themselves but for our community? Are they going to get behind our work to provide the roadshows to explain what the trade agreements mean, how to get a part of them and how to bring wealth and opportunity through those? Are they going to get behind our accelerated depreciation measure? That is not offered, as Labor did, as a sweetener to hide the sourness of yet another new Labor tax. At the same time, they removed a tax incentive for small business provided by the Howard government known as the entrepreneurs tax offset. How is that for a cunning plan? Take off a tax benefit for small business, with 400,000 benefiting from that, and put on a new tax that was actually limiting our capacity for the future. That is no plan. Only the coalition has a plan— (Time expired)

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