Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is not the first time I have risen in this House to speak on behalf of small business. I might just mention in passing right from the outset that the response to the former speaker's arguments just then were so eloquently put last year by her own leader and her own frontbench.

I would like to take this opportunity in the House today to report on a small business roundtable I recently held in Brisbane with the Minister for Small Business, Michael McCormack. We had quite a big number of attendees. Quite a number of local small business owners and operators—almost 100, in fact—came along to listen to the minister as well as to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Kate Carnell, and representatives of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Taxation Office. The roundtable was part of a much larger and very successful, I believe, small business roadshow that the minister has been conducting in recent weeks and months with the very clear intention of wanting to hear directly from small business owners and operators about the government's priorities and the government's progress in key areas of reform, as well as addressing the next steps to turbocharge small business, which is, after all, the engine room of our economy.

I have said it in this House before and I will say it again: collectively, small businesses are the biggest source of jobs and opportunities for all Australians. There are about 400,000 shopfronts, cafes, food outlets and stores around the country. Those are the types of small businesses that my family has been in for generations and which I was so proud to represent when I was the CEO of the National Retail Association. There are about 10,000 of those shopfronts in the electorate of Brisbane. Those shopfronts form a very big portion of the roughly 30,000 small businesses right across the electorate of Brisbane. The majority of these small businesses are family owned, of course.

If every small business could be encouraged to employ one more additional worker tomorrow, our unemployment rate would be zero, meaning that the majority of youth jobseekers, mature-aged Australians, Indigenous Australians and disabled who are looking for work would find the dignity they want and deserve. So it is not just good policy to ensure that small businesses are looked after. It is not just about the economy. It is vital to our entire community and society. This is about the real local stories of people who live, street by street, suburb by suburb, right across Brisbane and, indeed, right across the economy.

I felt that the small business roundtable was a really good event in allowing local small businesses to speak directly to the minister, the government and me but also especially because it gave access to some important officials from some of the government agencies which at times have been seen as fairly unapproachable and maybe large bureaucratic machines.

I wanted to say that the efforts of the ACCC and the ATO, one of which I used to work for early on in my career, to reach out and proactively engage with small businesses was certainly noticed by those present and by the Brisbane small business community. As somebody who has spoken before about the need for Australian regulators to change their approach to and their engagement with the small business sector, I commend them. I will continue to make small business policy a central focus of my efforts both in my constituency of Brisbane and down here in the parliament in Canberra.

I spoke earlier this week at some length about cutting taxes for small businesses. Between the tax cuts that this government is proposing, the Youth Jobs PaTH program, which I think is starting in about eight days, our measures to reduce unnecessary regulation and red tape, our simpler BAS, our instant asset write-offs and small business support that was the centrepiece of our last two budgets, our reforms of the banking sector, our innovation agenda and our trade agreements opening up trade possibilities for our businesses in Korea, Japan, China and Singapore, this is a government trying in every way possible to make it easier for the small businesses in Brisbane to grow, to invest and to create that single extra job each that would turbocharge our economy and cut unemployment.

I want to thank all of the business operators who took time out of their busy days to come along and participate. I want to thank the small business ombudsman for her participation. I also want to thank the ATO and the ACCC, and I want to thank the small business minister. (Time expired)

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