Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise and speak on this MPI. I come from a background of small business. In fact, I was in small business for 30 years before I came to this place. I went through the highs and lows of business, like all businesses do. I've always had my staff as my No. 1 asset. You always look after your staff. There's nothing worse than replacing a good staff member with someone unknown to your business. It's very time-consuming and quite stressful for the person who has to do the job of hiring someone new into your business. That does take its toll. That's why you've got to keep a strong economy. Small business does very well—there are 5.7 million employees working for small businesses with a turnover of under $10 million. It's important to realise that if your farming community is going well, your small business is going well; if your big business is going well, your small business is going well; and everyone benefits and profits if the economy is going well. Our job as a government is to make sure the economy is going well. We must give incentives to small business to prosper. If small business prospers, everyone prospers.

In my seat of Flynn I have large businesses—some of the biggest corporations in Australia including BHP, Rio Tinto and Glencore. I have SMEs. I have service industries and agriculture—people trying hard to make it on the land. They are the biggest gamblers I know. It costs so much to put a crop in and then you've got to wait for the rain to come or the rain to stop or the fires to abate. Those sorts of issues are all part of being a farmer. They are doing well in some cases, but what we're seeing in North Queensland now is total devastation. My heart goes to out to those guys who have faced the drought for seven to eight years, looked after their breeding cattle and got them to a point where they were all still alive and well, and then had them drown in a flood. It's heartbreaking. My heart is really with those people at this very point in time. Where do you start? How do you rebuild? They will be asking themselves those very questions right at this moment. Fortunately, we've got government assistance for the property owners—from $25,000 up to $75,000. There are health workers on the ground, et cetera. It's very much needed. But we've got to keep the economy going so everyone prospers.

In my seat of Flynn I've had projects on the board that funding was approved for back for 2016, but will the state government get those projects going? No, they won't. Will the state government drop their prices for irrigation water or power prices? They aren't controlled by the federal government; they are controlled by the state government. In Queensland—I can only talk about Queensland—the Queensland government is ripping $1.6 billion out of electricity prices, out of the consumers of Queensland, to keep their coffers going. They're not doing a very good job of that either, because Queensland has one of the biggest debts of all the states. We shouldn't have that debt. But someone has to pay for it and it's you, me, the taxpayers and the employees who have to pay for that debt. That just keeps on rolling down. I believe that the Northern Territory is not too good either, but that's the situation. So the state governments have to work well and then the economy works well. It's not happening in some states. This is the big issue. Why should the Queensland government take $1.67 billion from electricity users? Cane farmers in Bundaberg can't afford to pump water onto their cane fields. Those are the facts. If the cane farmers can't produce cane, jobs are gone. They can't pay the wages. It's a very simple formula. (Time expired)

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