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

In the last sitting week, Labor supported the government's legislation on the instant tax write-off and we were pleased to do so. There is no doubt at this time that small business does need a lift in confidence. We have seen business confidence flat line over the last year. It has now recovered to almost the level that it was prior to the last budget—but still below where it should be. We know small business has been suffering as consumer confidence has dropped as well. It is good to see this government doing something to repair the damage it has done to business and consumer confidence since it was elected over a year and half ago.

We are also pleased to see that they selected the instant tax write-off when they decided to do something about business confidence because we were against them when they cut it last year. The government members, I think, were not paying much attention when they are in opposition because in opposition the Labor government introduced an instant tax write-off at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, initially for $5,000 instant right house write-off which we increased to $6,500 on a permanent basis. It was well received by the small business sector generally. It was greatly appreciated. It was a permanent instant tax write-off that gave them an ongoing tax concession for every item they bought up to $6,500.

When the government came to power, one of the first things it did was abolish it because they did not think it was a good thing last year.

We are very pleased to see them finally recognise the error of their ways and reinstate what was a very good policy. It is unfortunate they have chosen to do it for only two years. Ours, of course, was ongoing. Theirs is for two years only; it finishes in 2017. What we expect to see then—and economists are broadly saying now that it is a bit of a hole as businesses pull their expenditure forward in order to benefit from the write-off—is a bit of a slump in 2017. That is unfortunate. It is unfortunate that the government did not see their way to reinstate the permanent, instant tax write-off that they abolished last year.

The motion also refers to the period when Labor was in government during the global financial crisis and the number of jobs in small business at the time. Again, I wonder whether members of the government, when they were in opposition, slept through the global financial crisis because we suffered the largest and deepest recession in the world economy since World War II during our time in government. I am incredibly proud of the way the Labor government supported small business at the time. You might remember, Deputy Speaker, that construction had flatlined. There were large construction companies in my electorate that had started to lay off staff; they were down to three days a week. It was the extraordinary building and stimulus package of the time which kept those businesses working during that period. There were some very good results across the board. While most economies went into recession, Australia was one of only two developed economies that did not go into recession.

It was an incredible piece of economic management in hindsight. There was an overall increase in the number of employed people from 9.5 to 10.6 million during the worst global recession the world had seen since World War II. We actually grew jobs, and we grew the number of small businesses. The total number of businesses in Australia grew. The number of people employed in medium enterprises grew by 822,000 and, in large businesses, by 757,000 workers. This, again, was quite a strong economic performance—I would say an exceptionally strong economic performance—given that we were facing the largest recession the world had seen and no other economy survived that recession the way ours did, largely because of the work of the Labor government but also some historical work done by previous governments as well.

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