Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thriving and growing small businesses are vital for regions like mine. In Macquarie, we have more than 10,000 small businesses—many in construction, many are producers, many are professional services, many are manufacturers and many work in retail. There are also many more self-employed people working from home and potentially growing into a business, especially if they are well-supported by government policy. Let's remember my electorate of Macquarie is on Sydney's fringe, so we battle to have enough local jobs to keep people on our mountains or in our lowlands, sparing them the two-hour, on average, each-way commute into the city.

I have to say that I am sick and tired of hearing people like the member for Fisher or the member for Goldstein thinking that they have some arrogant birthright to run a small business. Let's get clear: there are plenty of people on our side who have spent many years in small business, and I am one of them. I grew up in small business as the daughter of a newsagent. I have had my own businesses for up to 30 years, bar the eight months I worked for somebody—a pregnancy—when I came back from I overseas. I was a PAYG earner for eight months of the last 30 years. So it is not an abstract exercise for me. I absolutely get what we need to do and I support the premise that the sector is vital. In fact, it is vital in my electorate.

Regarding the motion by the member for Boothby, some of it puzzles me. She seems to think that the government's job in helping small business is done. Let's take a look. There is a plan to cut taxes for Australian small businesses. That is not law yet. We support a cut for small business, but we do not agree with the view that it should be extended to the biggest multinationals on this globe. She also talked about backing small business with access to an instant asset write-off program, and, as has been pointed out by previous speakers, that was actually our idea. It is a good idea, and it certainly helps business invest fast in things. She talked about levelling the playing field for small businesses online. That is something else that has not yet been passed. To think that the job is done is so short of the mark—that all you have to do now is shop local and small business is somehow fixed. We need a whole lot more than that. That is a lovely thing to do, and I, for one, did all my Christmas shopping locally. But there is much more that governments can do, and I think there are also things governments should not do. Penalty rate cuts is one of those.

I have looked at the impact in my electorate of the cut in penalty rates. You would take $77 a week out of the pay packet of people who would normally spend it locally. That adds up to a lot of money coming out of my local community. Let's look at what we should not do. We should not be cutting penalty rates. What would be great for the businesses in my region is to do something about rents. They can manage their staff based on demand, but they cannot do anything about their overheads, so their rent is their biggest problem.

There are things that we know could be put in place by this government. One is that they could help small business access finance. We are, I think, the only OECD country with no small-business loan guarantee. You have to mortgage or sell your house—my dad had to sell his house to go into business in the seventies—and put your family at risk. That is something that women, in particular, are often reluctant to do. My business partner and I made a choice to grow organically. We did that over many years, but we would have grown a lot faster if we had been able to access a guaranteed small-business loan.

Another thing governments can do is help small business incorporate. My business was incorporated 25 years ago. It gives you asset protection, it helps you retain profits for working capital, it gives you access, if you need it, to capital gains tax discounts where they apply, it gives you succession planning and it allows for income distribution. All those things are missed out on by sole traders, and there are so many who look at the structure and say, 'It's just too hard to become incorporated.'

Another thing this government can do is get NBN right, because my local businesses tell me that, when you have the mishmash of NBN that the electorate of Macquarie is getting—FTTP, FTTC, FTTN, wireless, satellite—those sorts of things are plaguing small business. FTTN is causing outages, slow speeds, connection problems and shocking service. We need to fix those. The best thing this government can do is get its act together on NBN and then they can just let self-employed people get on with it.

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