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

If only the words spoken by members opposite were true. If only this was a government for small business. If only the policies it introduced would make the difference that it claims to have made. But let us look at the facts. Business confidences has been low since this government was elected. The only time it has been lower than under this government in the last 20 years was in the worst year of the global financial crisis. Other than that, business confidence is at some of its lowest levels that we have seen for a long time. Growth is down, capex is down, terms of trade are at appalling levels, debt and deficit have doubled, wages growth is down and confidence, as I said, has largely flatlined. Unemployment is up and the number of job hours that are actually worked and paid for is down. That is something that this government does not talk about much.

They talk about the number of people looking for work going up and it is. That is not surprising when you cut their family payments. It is not surprising when you cut family payments that so many woman are returning to the workforce—and most of the jobs created were actually part-time jobs for women. There has been a loss of full-time jobs, a loss of hours worked in total, but an increase in the number of women returning to the workforce.

But I want to return to small business. There is no doubt that if Australia wants to prosper in this rapidly changing world where supply chains are fragmented and businesses are forming relationships all around the world and finding profound new ways to do business it will be the small businesses of Australia that determine whether we succeed in that world. It will be the small businesses of Australia, not the big ones, that are the first ones to break the rules and find new ways of working, to move forward through those fragmented supply chains and to find a place for themselves in the world.

But what we have seen from this government is the destruction of the very economic structures that support the development of those businesses and those supply chains. We have seen the decimation of the car industry and, with that, the hundreds of thousands of people working in small businesses all around the country who are in these complex and highly skilled fragmented supply chains in this country. When you wipe out the Australian car manufacturing industry you also make it incredibly difficult for Australia to retain the skills that it will need for these small businesses to participate in this fragmented global supply chain. You effectively take them out of action at the very time when they should be leading the Australian charge to export into those supply chains.

Look at renewable energy: there has been an 80 per cent reduction in investment in renewable energy, mainly by small companies and small businesses in the renewable sector. In Parramatta we had 14 solar installers two years ago and now we have one. That is 13 businesses that were in a growth sector and that should actually be working on the future industries of Australia that are gone. They are gone because of this government.

Look what the government did in the first budget to anything to do with innovation. They closed down Commercialisation Australia, the Innovation and Investment Fund, and Clean Energy Finance Corporation. They were their targets—innovation was their target in that first budget. Scrapping the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which they are still struggling to do but they are weakening it day by day. Enterprise Connect has also gone. A program, acknowledged by industry to be one of the most successful in our history, has gone—gone! Anything that was about innovation, anything that was about the future and anything that would support Australian business and skills as we move forward in this incredibly competitive world has gone. What do we get instead? What is the signature? What is the only thing that they have to be proud of? It is the reintroduction of an instant tax write-off, which they abolished a year earlier. They abolished the instant tax write-off, which was a Labor policy, and the loss carry-back scheme and the accelerated vehicle depreciation when they first got elected because it was bad policy. Then, a year and a half later, they renounce it, albeit larger, but only for two years and claim that it was a great boon. It was a boon when it was there before. It was a good policy when they scrapped it. So the one thing they can claim is to reinstate a policy that they scrapped.

Everything else that the government do—everything—is about shutting down Australia's future. It is about reducing our skills and reducing the capacity of our small businesses to take on the world and become part of these massive international fragmented global supply chains. It is as though they belong in the last century and, unfortunately, they are taking us back there with them.

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