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

A number of years ago, before I was a member of parliament, I was running my own business, and I was headhunted by a man called David Williams who runs Shock Records, who turned out to be one of the great negotiators of all time because he managed to convince me to take on the management of the national association of independent record labels on a percentage basis when it had five grand in the bank and 20 members. He managed to convince me to do that and I did, and, a number of years later, it was representing virtually 95 per cent of the sector and it had five staff. But, during that time, I spent a lot of time in this place and in government departments lobbying for things that my sector needed in order to do well, and one of the things that you always wanted, as a person who represented an industry and represented a small business, was for whatever thing you were arguing for to have bipartisan support. The last thing you wanted ever was for something that mattered to small business to become politicised because, when it did, uncertainty developed. The timing blew out, sometimes to years. It came and went. Uncertainty ensued. So, for us, it was always a case of trying to find members of the public service to work with and avoiding working with politicians until the last moment until you had support—trying to keep things as bipartisan as possible for as long as possible.

In all the meetings I have had with similar organisations since I came to this place—and I have had three in the last week with representatives of various small business associations—there is a single thing they all ask for. They ask for all sorts of things—sometimes the same thing; sometimes different things—but they always ask for one thing: 'Can you make this bipartisan?' It is the single thing that they all ask for, because they want the certainty. And I usually say: 'Well, we'll see what we can do. But there is not a three word slogan in it, so I am hopeful,' because we know that, if the government can find a three word slogan, they will make it political. And many, many things that business wants should actually be pursued in a bipartisan manner because both sides of government believe that small business is incredibly important and needs the support of this parliament.

Having watched what has happened in the last two weeks, particularly about the instant asset write-off, I am not so hopeful anymore, because this is an area of policy that we do agree on. We have agreed on it since it was presented on budget night. On budget night, the Leader of the Opposition said: 'We support that.' He said it the next day. In the budget reply he said: 'We support it.' And we have said it every day since then. And yet, for the last 21 days, we have had government members going out and trying to convince the small business associations and the small businesses out in their communities that there is doubt about this legislation—that somehow Labor might not support it; that the government is the friend of small business, and Labor is the enemy and might bring this great policy undone before their very eyes. Every day they have gone out and done that. And in this House they have gone out and done it. On 1 June, Tony Abbott said:

With the economy in transition, it is important that these budget measures to help small business get through the parliament as quickly as possible, some small businesses are reluctant to invest until the measure has passed the parliament. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, let us not let politics get in the way of economics. Let us not let self-interest get in the way of national interest. Let us pass this bill straight away.

On the same day, Joe Hockey said:

So here is a challenge for the Labor Party. This legislation is going to go through the House of Representatives this week—absolutely right. Then it goes to the Senate, which has only two weeks to sit. I lay down the challenge to the Labor Party: help us to get that legislation through the Senate as quickly as possible.

Bruce Billson on 26 May said:

The only thing people are uncertain about is whether Labor are going to muck around with this. Are they going to stand in the road?

Time after time in the last two weeks we have seen members of the government get up and say: 'Labor might not support this. There is doubt. Be fearful. Be worried. Put off spending. Put off using this until we are certain that Labor won't get in the way.' They have stood here in this House and they have said it—even though, on budget night and the day after, and in the budget reply and every day after that, we on this side of the House have been totally clear that we support it. This is an extraordinary turn of events—a government that claims to be about certainty, and claims to be for small business, in a case where there is bipartisan support for a policy, cannot help themselves but try to find some political weapon to use. It is as if Tony Abbott's three-word slogan is his character: 'No, no, no. We cannot get on with this. We have to find some way of manoeuvring this and making a political benefit.' It is quite extraordinary.

Today we have seen, perhaps, the culmination of it. Having asked over and over again in this House for a commitment from Labor to support it—even though we committed to support it—when we get up and move that the motion be put and say 'let's get on with it; let's just pass it now', they vote against it. Most of them were confused, by the way. I am not sure all of them knew what they were voting for, but they voted anyway. We asked that the motion be put now, that it be voted on, that it be done. It could be done now. It could have been done yesterday, by the way, when it was on the Notice Paper, until the government decided to delay it a day. Who knows why? There might be a news cycle or something that will be in their favour. It was scheduled for yesterday; they moved it to today; they have delayed it 24 hours; and now they are delaying it for probably another 24 hours, because there are eight hours worth of speeches on this list. It could have been passed this morning. It was not, because the government decided that they did not want to pass it straight away. Having argued for it, and having stood up in this House day after day saying they wanted to pass it straight away and Labor was in the way, it turns out that it is exactly the other way around—Labor was prepared to pass it this morning; they are not. They want to delay it for as long as they can, presumably for some political advantage, in their minds, that we might see play out today somehow—who knows? It could have been passed. It has not been.

The reason you can be absolutely certain that Labor was going to support this—you could have been pretty much certain before we even knew about it—was that it was Labor's policy. Labor introduced an instant tax write-off for small business when it was in government. The current government, when in opposition—Tony Abbott, Bruce Billson, Joe Hockey—all argued against it. They said it would not work. They said that business did not have the cash; that it would not work; that it was bad. They argued against it—all three of them. They argued against it in 2011. They argued against it in 2012. They argued against it in 2013. Then they were elected, and they abolished it. They stood in this House, and in the Senate, and they abolished the instant tax write-off that Labor had introduced, because they thought it was a bad idea—it was bad in 2011, 2012, 2013, and it was bad in 2014 when they abolished it retrospectively. Labor argued to keep it. We thought it was good policy. Labor argued and fought to keep the instant tax write-off in place, and the government argued to abolish it because they thought it was bad. So having now changed their minds, and decided it is actually a good thing after all, you would think they would know that Labor had thought it was a good thing all that time, and that we would support it. We did, and we did support it.

Here we have a government that jumps to its feet to claim credit for reinstating something they had abolished the year before and argued against for three years. With incredible front, they are now claiming the moral high ground and blaming Labor for the uncertainty on this—even though small businesses, probably for nine months, were unsure whether the bill abolishing it would go through parliament. Then it was done retrospectively.

It is a similar story on the tax cut for small business. Again, it is a good thing and something that Labor supported on budget night and the day after, and in the budget-in-reply we said we wanted to work in a bipartisan way and go further. That seems to be a pretty strong indication that we support a business tax cut for small business—we said we wanted to go further. Yet, again, we have had the Treasurer, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Small Business in this House trying to create uncertainty in the small business sector, as if Labor, somehow, were not going to support this. It had been our policy when we were in government. We tried to introduce a small-business tax cut when we were in government. Guess why it did not happen? Because the then opposition thought it was a bad idea and they argued against it. They did not want to do it. In opposition they did not want to do it, but now, miraculously, they have changed their mind and they are trying to tell people that Labor is standing in the way. Small business could have had this tax cut three or four years ago if the opposition had not stood in the way. They could have had it three or four years ago, and we could now be talking—as Labor wants to—about where you go from there. The government, when in opposition, stood in the way of small-business tax cuts—not Labor. We wanted to do it for years. They argued against it. It was a bad idea because it came from Labor. If it comes from Labor, it must be a bad idea, as far as this government is concerned.

We hear a lot in the media, and from this government, about the difficulty of governing when you do not have the numbers in the Senate. I want to spend a few minutes talking about that because it really is disingenuous for this government to talk about the difficulties of getting stuff through this House. There were two parliaments in the history of Australia that had, perhaps, the most difficult Senates around. One was the Whitlam government, who we all know. Whitlam did not get anything through—no legislation through—without the support of the opposition. Every single thing that Whitlam did, and that you remember him for, that required legislation, had to be negotiated through with the opposition—every single thing. Kevin Rudd was the same. People do not realise that. When the government gets up and carries on about what Kevin Rudd did when he was in government—the numbers in the Senate were such that the Liberals had the numbers. So everything that Kevin Rudd got through the parliament, he had to get through with the support of the opposition. It is called negotiating. And yet, he managed to get 95 per cent of his legislation through, because he negotiated. He treated the opposition with respect. He talked to them. He made sure the work was done ahead of time, and he actually got it done.

This government plays the politics at every single moment. This government plays politics with every single issue. It is even playing politics with something that we have agreed to. They could not even accept bipartisan support. They could not even accept that an opposition could get up and say, 'We support this.' They had to try to turn that around for their own political gain. It is truly extraordinary. It is because of that politicking that everything they touch turns into politics rather than government. Because everything is about politics, and not governance, we see this extraordinary decline in business confidence over the last two years. We can see it from day one. We can see business confidence figures start to fall from the election. They freefall—as down and down and down they go—from the 2013 election. Immediately after the first budget, down they go again.

So it is not surprising that we see a government that has to try and do something to bring confidence back. But the way to bring confidence back is to bring it with certainty: 'There's going to be an instant tax write-off; the opposition supports it. That's great. Let's get on with it.' Let's get on with it this morning. Let's get on with it. Don't go out on a travelling circus tour in your high-vis vest or whatever and make sure that business is as uncertain as possible because you tell fibs—and I am being very generous about the opposition's position. We have been clear on this. Let's look at where we are because of the uncertainty and the politicising of everything by this government.

In the wake of last week's capex figures, we can see that private capital expenditure data for the March quarter fell by 4.4 per cent. It is 11 per cent down since the federal election. It is recession rates. It is at recession levels. Capex has collapsed. Unemployment is up. They inherited an unemployment figure with a five in front of it; it now has a six in front of it, and it is going up. It is projected to go up every year of the forwards. This is the legacy of this government.

We have seen business confidence fall down and down and down. With this measure, which is designed to boost business confidence, we see it rising slightly, to about the level it was immediately before last year's budget. So, again, when you look at the trends, it is really quite a flat-line trend. There is an incredible amount of work to do to boost confidence in the business sector.

I say to the government: if you want to do that, you do not go out for your own political ends and create uncertainty where there is certainty. You are already creating uncertainty. You have created it in the renewable energy space. You have created it in the car industry. You have created it in the many small businesses that support the submarine industry. You have created it in the childcare sector. You have created it with GPs and with community pharmacists. You name it, you have created uncertainty.

This is in an area in which you had certainty; this is an area that required certainty in order for it to have the stimulatory boost that you wanted it to have. You had certainty and you had agreement; and you went out and, in a wilful way, trying to create uncertainty where there was none. That is an extraordinary thing for a government to do.

You did it in opposition. You did it effectively in opposition, to the detriment of the country. But you do not do that in government. Stimulation requires certainty. You had it. You destroyed it.

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