Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, one of our most important issues is small business driving Australia's economy back into a strong position, which it was not able to do under a Labor government. It is quite simple. Too often, Labor, held captive by special interest groups, forget that it is small and medium businesses that generate the economic confidence and the cycling and multiplier effects that see Australian money kept right here in Australia, driving new jobs and opportunities for young Australians, in particular.

Part of my job in Bowman is to make sure that every local can engage with the real economy. In my electorate, there are 3,000 Australians who are receiving income support right now. Many of them are doing so for very good reasons. But, 800 of that 3,000 people, not all of them young, are absolutely job ready and looking for an opportunity to do the simplest of tasks, even those without training. But they are denied. Imagine just how soul destroying it is to turn up 10 times every fortnight to look an employer in the eye at a job interview and be told no. It is soul destroying to have it happen once in your career. But for those on Newstart who are trying to remain eligible for their payments it is an experience that they are subjected to daily. This must change.

We must not measure a job seeker's desire for work by how many job interviews they front up to and are rebuffed at. We need to measure that will on their ability to pick up a pen or shovel or to join an NGO and be part of a team, shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl, with other Australian workers. Every Australian deserves the right to be able to wake up on a Monday morning and show up somewhere to learn a capability and, from that, gain opportunity in this incredible global economy and the role Australia plays in it. But our welfare system has failed those people.

They are not all 17 and 18 years of age. They are not all people who are working in the fast food industry, trying to hold on to their penalty rates. There are 50-year-olds and above who feel that they have been ejected from the economy and completely disconnected from it. In my electorate, there are 800 such people. You can multiply that number by 150 electorates. These are broken souls with broken lives. They do not deserve that fate in this great nation. We are a nation big and generous enough to give everyone ago and not sideline people and disconnect them from the opportunities Australia can offer.

If you do an international comparison, you will find that Australia has the highest proportion of dwellings that have under their roof not a single person with a job. We have the highest proportion in the OECD of households utterly reliant on welfare payments to put food on the table. We have to break that nexus. We have to break into those households and offer just one person the opportunity to earn a wage, something that most of us here take for granted. But some people do not take it for granted, particularly in poorer parts of our large cities and in our regional cities where industry is disappearing.

Paradoxically, in remote Australia, employment rates are fairly high if you are lucky enough in the lottery of life not to be Indigenous. If you are Indigenous, of course, the figures are alarming. It is virtually impossible to set up a small business in an Indigenous community. It is impossible to lease a space to run a business. It is impossible to own your own home.

I want to give a snapshot of that. In the tiny western Arnhem community of Ramingining, if you finish high school—and the odds of that are slim—the odds of you finding a job in your community are at five per cent. What happens to the rest of those people? They are committed to a life of welfare. The odds of someone ultimately finding any form of employment in that community is 15 per cent. It is almost exclusively public sector salaries—money transfers into Indigenous communities handed out by government to do things the government want you to do. What is missing in Indigenous communities is small business, self-evidently. What is missing entirely is a private sector of any form except the local store, which receives government money to remain viable. I support fully the opportunities of training Indigenous people in that one small business called the community store. But, in Australia, we have 67 per cent workforce participation. In Indigenous communities, we have 15 per cent public sector workforce participation and barely a private sector job for hundreds of miles.

How did we create this? How did Australia manage to put together a remote Indigenous picture of zero private sector? That is the complete absence of small business and the ability to benefit from the legislation we are debating today. There is simply nothing to do and no possibility to own a home or business or to give it a red-hot go. There are Indigenous Australians who could easily run a barbershop, bakery or takeaway store. There are a whole range of services they could run, but they are thwarted at every level by the Native Title Act and by an overall despondency that prevents people from giving it a crack. It is okay to fail. That is at the heart of entrepreneurship. But it is something that is completely removed from these parts of Australia.

I will come back now to the mainstream and cities around this country where unincorporated small businesses were a blind spot for the Labor government for six years. It took the Liberal Party and this coalition government to recognise that we need to reward unincorporated small businesses. If you do not, company tax cuts benefit only 30 per cent of businesses in this country. We are delivering an elegant solution by offering a five per cent discount on the tax payable for individuals who have a business income from a business that is not incorporated. It makes complete sense. It is roughly equivalent to the 1.5 per cent company tax rate that is enjoyed by those whose businesses are incorporated. In essence, it is capped at around $1,000 per individual. That is incredibly welcome to those small businesses around the country.

I want to set the picture here. In my electorate, we have around 1,500 incorporated small businesses. But many, many more small, unincorporated entities are giving it a go, with people working from home and seeing if their business can fly before determining if they want to actually lease a location. By giving them these concessions to set up and use a single portal and immediately write off some of their costs, you are activating the very engine room that is going to get us out of this mess that we are in.

No-one in this chamber, regardless of how self-important we are, can do anything about collapsing commodity prices. None of us can do anything about the debt mire that Europe finds itself in. Australia was heading in the same direction until we changed government and turned the plane out of its death dive. No-one can do anything about the challenges we face from South-East Asia and the missed opportunities because we do not have an open mind towards foreign investment, but we can do something for our small businesses.

We can do something for the people who sweat over spreadsheets every night, for the people who never know who will walk in the door the next day, for the people who never know whether they will have an income the following day. These are people who take a chance; these are people who take risks. They are not people who receive a regular public sector income every two weeks and who can add on top of that overtime whenever they feel like it—they do not have that luxury. They do not live with that certainty. But, without them, we are nothing.

We are one of the great small business nations on earth. Maybe after the Czech Republic, we have the most number of small businesses per head of population. So we have a proud heritage, one that we can celebrate. But if you do not introduce things like this bill when you are in government then you do not do the right thing by small business. Do not take my word for it—you would expect me to support it because I am on this side of the chamber. Actually talk to the people who know. Talk to the representative groups that are looking out for small business and that understand that the only way to multiply money is to (a) keep it in your country; (b) spend it on people in your own community; and (c) be value-adding. There is no value-adding in employing more public servants. You pay them a salary out of the tax everyone kindly pays, but there is no multiplying factor for a public service. They are not in that industry. The bigger make your public service, the more you crowd out innovation. That is why, over here, we say: it is not that we have anything against public servants; we just do not like borrowing from China and the Middle East to pay their salaries. If you are going to have public servants, that is fine, but make sure they are on the front line delivering a service. Those are utterly reasonable propositions.

Take Queensland. I am the only doctor here that works in active practice at the moment. I work in a wonderful hospital most Fridays. Under the former coalition state government, waiting lists were diminishing as we set up incentives for doctors to get through their waiting lists. Within two or three months of Labor's return to power in Queensland, around the corner came the waiting lists, and they are now growing again. That in itself is bad enough. But, in relation to the health system, Labor went to the election saying, 'We are going to re-employ all of those nurses that were taken away by Campbell Newman.' When we went to the hospitals in the last month and said, 'Where can we put the nurses?' the hospitals said, 'We don't know. We're actually doing the job okay without all those nurses,' because the nurses were not doing face-to-face work at all. They were second- and third-tier education nurses, not looking after patients. The hospitals did not actually need them. It was an Anna Bligh strategy to hide unemployment by employing more nurses. The great majority of them never saw a patient. Now we have hospitals that do not need them. They are working perfectly well without the extra non-service-providing nurses. Labor can put them back in out of ideology. Labor will pay their debt back to the unions and employ them. But you will not see one change in standard of care or in the number of services provided unless they are on the front line. At the moment, the front line is adequate in A&E, but we are watching waiting lists very carefully, as they are already blowing out. I have diverged slightly, Deputy Speaker, and I appreciate your indulgence.

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