Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party, Minister for Small and Family Business, the Workplace and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. Again, as I said last week, he has first-hand, grassroots experience beyond the front lines. His family business is now being run by his lovely wife.

I wanted to pick up on where the Prime Minister left off, because the misunderstanding of business on the other side goes further than what was being stated. The Treasurer and I on Friday visited Qantas, talking tax cuts. We found out from Alan Joyce, who has done a marvellous job reinvigorating that company, that some 3,000 SMEs are included in Qantas supply chains. This is the part that gets so often overlooked. Business does not operate in a vacuum. Business irrespective of size doesn't just engage with its customers, but more often than not their customers are other businesses. If you leave more money, more profits, from those businesses in their own bank accounts, they will invest, engaging with other SMEs.

Alan Joyce gave me a couple of particular examples of those SMEs in Tasmania. In Tasmania alone in the last 12 months, under the Treasurer and the Prime Minister's economic plan, 4,000 new businesses have opened up. Unemployment since the election of the Hodgman government has moved from 7½ per cent at the end of the Greens-Labor farce to now 5.8 per cent and 10,500 jobs have been created. Last year, despite 17,000 businesses not making one dollar in profit, they paid $575 million to around some 16,000 employees.

If you don't make the tax cuts and the reinvestment in those 17,000 businesses and 16,000 jobs, with some 6,000 more due to the excellent stewardship the Hodgman Liberal government has provided, the turnaround that has endured as a result will disappear most likely overnight, because they are not making a profit. They are paying them out of their own pockets.

I am asked what the alternative is. The alternative is the ACTU's Sally McManus coming up with Labor Party policy; the member for Gorton parroting it within 24 to 48 hours; and then within three to four months the Leader of the Opposition declares it as official Labor Party policy. The risk to small and family businesses in this country, and business irrespective of size, is that the opposition should take these benches, because if they did I fear for the jobs of those hard-working Australian working in small and family businesses, not now but well into the future.

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