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

A year and a half of famine, and what a feast! I can understand the member for Oxley getting a little excited and not being able to ask a succinct question. You have been denied the opportunity for so long. I admire the fact that you have finally had a chance and you have come out of the shelter. I sincerely thank the member for Oxley. He is talking about instant asset write-off—a measure, as I recall, originally introduced by the now Treasurer. It is a measure that Labor sought to present as some kind of sweetener for the sourness of your mining tax—a sweetener, as you stole a tax discount the Howard government put in place, that benefited more than 400,000 of our smallest businesses. Do you remember the entrepreneurs tax offset—that discount, that incentive, that important statement put in place by the Howard government that saw the income tax paid by our smallest businesses reduced? You abolished that. And then you went out to the small business community, who you had driven into a ditch through poor administration and through the introduction of a carbon tax, and said to the small businesses of Australia to either suck it up or pass it on to their customers when you knew darn well that was not possible. We are making a more attractive, better environment for small businesses. We have removed the carbon tax to take cost pressures out.

Mr Hawke interjecting—

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