Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Of course not, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have not deluded myself into thinking the Abbott government have been unquestionably good for small business. They destroyed confidence with that first budget; that is a fact. You can see it in the various business surveys. They originally abolished the instant asset write-off—a policy that I was proud to work on, with the member for Charlton and others. They knocked off the accelerated depreciation of motor vehicles. All these things were very damaging for confidence, investor confidence and small business confidence in our community.

So when the member for Hughes and his colleagues go around patting themselves on the back for their small business policy, let us not forget that they are celebrating reinstating Labor policy.

When the member for Hughes was up that end of the chamber, rather than at this end of the chamber, he was talking about these disastrous socialist Labor policies. These are the policies that the government have just copied in the most recent budget and they want to be congratulated for it. They abolished them, they reinstated them in an inferior form and they now want to be congratulated for this triumph of public policy making by reinstating the policies that the member for Hughes, in the last half an hour, described as disastrous. Their political approach to small business, the way that they have created such uncertainty in the small business sector and the economy really says it all. That is especially true, I think, when it comes to green businesses. In my electorate there is a small but growing band of renewable energy and green businesses, which are small. They will one day be big, because they understand something that the government does not and that is that renewable energy is a tremendous source of jobs and investment into the future.

I want to support those renewable energy companies—those green companies—in my electorate, particularly the smaller ones. Labor has a wide-ranging approach. We will deliver the NBN. We will support small businesses in the renewable sector. We will lower the small business tax rate to 25 per cent, down from 30, and we will develop a culture of innovation in this country, because we want an economy that is powered by the aspirations, the creativity, the ideas and the hard work of all the small businesses which make our economy stronger than it would otherwise be.

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