Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was cold but they were fired up, so it was quite warm in that building! They were outraged at what has been going on—and the attempts by this government to save money by putting more people onto satellite than were ever intended. It is holding back so many people in their small business operations. They are just outraged at the impediments to their development that have been created by the flawed NBN approach by this government.

What we need is a much more imaginative approach. I must also refer to the government's attacks on penalty rates in this context, because we are now coming very close to the situation where those penalty rate cuts will take effect on 1 July. This is absolutely critical to rural and regional Australia. We know that the McKell Institute's analysis shows that workers in rural Australia will be losing between $370 million to $691 million a year through the partial abolition of penalty rates in the retail and hospitality sectors. We are going to lose disposable income of between $174 million and $343 million in rural and regional Australia through this measure.

This is the big economic impediment right now. This is the thing that is the weak link in the government's own budget—wages. There is not enough money circulating in this economy to drive small business and to drive growth. It is this government's contractionary policies, through things like penalty rate cuts and through advocating at the Fair Work Commission for no rise to the minimum wage, that are really hurting our economy.

In New South Wales that penalty rate situation means that we are going to be losing somewhere between $118 million to $220 million, with a loss of disposable income of between $53 million and $106 million. In my local Monaro economy alone we will lose $16 million. This is going to have a serious impact on small businesses, and that is where they need the help. Consumer volume is the single biggest issue for a small business, which wants to have that going through the door.

I also want to talk a little about the impacts on broader small businesses of the approach to the defence industry by this government. We have seen, as I mentioned, the shock that has been created in the shipbuilding yards. We have seen small businesses, like Taylor Brothers in Tasmania and J&H Williams in Adelaide, who make the ducting for these vessels, have a drop-off in work created by not building the supply vessels here and continuing the Future Frigates. This has caused tremendous to disruption to so many small businesses around the country.

In the process of Land 400 we are also seeing small businesses like Elphinstone in Tasmania, which does a great job in bending metal, being ignored in that. Across the border here, in Queanbeyan, EOS does world-class remote weapons station technology. They were not even allowed to compete in the Land 400 process. We have the US Marines in Singapore and all these other countries looking at their technology, but their own country slammed the door in their face. There is no proactive marrying up of Australian SMEs with the primes in any of these projects. And by cutting and destroying what capacity we had within the DMO and by cutting the programs Labor had, we just are not seeing that proactivity in growing Australian businesses in our defence procurement processes.

And we have seen, for example, the killing of the Skilling Australia's Defence Industry program, SADI. It has gone; it went last year. We had 2,600 apprentices supported through SADI. Every aspect of the employment chain was supported through that program. There was the Defence Future Capability Technology Centre, which spawned the Defence Materials Technology Centre; the Australian Industry Capability Program that we started; the Defence Export Unit helped those companies to export; and the Global Supply Chain Program was really the key forward for a lot of our businesses. We may not be making whole units of products; the key now is to get into global supply chains with componentry. That would have been the future for the car industry if we had really seen some imagination from this government in that respect to save it. The Defence Industry Innovation Centre, and all of these programs, including a Priority Industry Capability Innovation Program and a Priority Industry Capability Development Fund, were helping Australian businesses. We need to get this country on track, to exploit the potential of the new economies, to grow the jobs of the future and to then make sure it is supported by the infrastructure that will deliver those skills—not cuts to universities and not smashing up the TAFEs. We need this government to really look at what supports small business.

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