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

I thank the member for moving this motion on supporting small businesses, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about something I care a great deal about, which is small business. I hear a lot, in this House, small business being talked about as the backbone and the engine room and the job creator and, of course, it is. But I do not want to talk about what small business does today I want to talk about why—why it is valuable, beyond the jobs and beyond the strict interpretation of economy as jobs and growth.

There was some wonderful research done in the US, recently, that looked at the longevity of a person when their long-term partner dies: they have been married for 50 years and then their partner dies. How long does that person live? What this research found was very interesting. It showed that there was a direct correlation between the longevity of the surviving partner and the vibrancy of the street life in the community in which they lived—in other words, the stronger the small-business community that provided those networks, the longer the person lived.

The reason for that is quite simple. When that surviving partner walked down the street and saw the fruiterer they had known for 20 years and the restaurant where they had got engaged, and all the small businesses that were there, and their history was there, people saw them as the surviving member of a partnership. Someone saw them, so their partner was still with them walking in that environment. When you walk down a street where you know no one, you do not take your history and your life with you. Street life is an incredibly important social element in the world of people, and that is what we are. We are a community of people.

In many ways, it is the by-product of the small business. The small business is the bath but the baby is that mirror you get, that sense of place when you recognise people you have relationships with—the safety net that the butcher who has been there for 40 years plays when they notice that old Mrs Jones down the road is looking a bit unkempt and hasn't been in for her meat this week. The relationships that provide the safety nets for our community are the things that really matter, and that is why small business matters. Not any small business—when we lose one small business and replace it with another, that is not the same, because we lose the baby, we lose the relationships. We lose the relationships with suppliers and we lose the flow of money through our local economy as well when we lose a business and replace it with another.

I would like to see us have a debate about what causes this country to lose completely viable businesses that are viable in their own right but some external factors cause them to go. If you listen carefully to the small-business advocates around the country you hear that. You hear the unlevel playing field, the effect of the cash economy, the underpayment of workers on legitimate business, that unfair competition and reduced spending capacity of their customers who work for these businesses as well. It is also the phoenixing, late payments, unequal bargaining with big companies, access to finance, access to justice if you want to defend your business against unfair behaviour, unfair tenancy agreements and unequal bargaining positions on those, councils that do not seem to consider the needs of existing businesses when they rezone and, effectively, price the local business out of that market. When you rezone it is not just homebuyers that are affected, you also affect the rental and capacity of small businesses to stay in the communities in which they built those relationships. You lose the business and you lose the baby that that business provides.

When we live in 90-minutes cities, as we do—not 30-minutes cities but 90-minute cities when you are out west—people leave home early. They do not buy the coffee at the local cafe, they do not come home and have dinner in the local restaurant. So not only do they not support the local business but also they do not build that sense of relationship and cohesion that is one of the great benefits of having strong local businesses. Research shows across the board that active relationships actually support our community in many, many ways. You can see arguments by small business that big business avoids tax but small business does not have the same opportunity to do so. Arguably, neither should. The cuts to family payments, the cuts to penalty rates and the reduction in payments for people at the lower end of the spectrum reduce the spending capacity of their customers. The appalling stuff-up of the NBN affects business all over the country and their ability to do their work. There is the scrapping of the loss carry-back. There is a lack of any action by this government to stimulate demand and work towards the building of community so that we strengthen that multiplier. We have a lot to talk about. (Time expired)

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