Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Hansard source

If it really believed in helping small businesses, if it really believed in supporting the business community, this government would be doing two things: it would be fixing national quarantine and it would be fixing the vaccination rollout. These are the things that, more than anything else, businesses in my electorate are raising with me. They do not understand. The leaders of small businesses run logistics operations day in, day out. They watch the absolute incompetence of this vaccination rollout and say: 'This is the one thing you could do to support us. It's the one piece of public health infrastructure that would support our businesses right now.' Instead, in the first half of this year we've had two lockdowns in Western Australia because hotel quarantine is no longer fit for purpose and our community is not vaccinated.

Businesses say to me time and time again that they want to get quarantine out of my electorate, out of the Perth CBD, because when it leaks it leaks into our most-densely-populated suburbs, and it is those small businesses—the cafes in the city who rely on workers going in and out each day—that pay the price more than anyone else. So the piece of investment that this budget really needed was an investment in a national quarantine solution. We've seen proposals come week after week, including RAAF Base Learmonth and RAAF Base Busselton. The latest proposal is putting something at Perth Airport. Any of these would be a major investment in making sure that our small businesses, our family businesses and our microenterprises can continue to invest with confidence, because they will see the government doing what they should be doing, which is providing the sort of public health infrastructure that gives them the certainty and confidence to invest. It was August last year, almost a year ago, when the World Health Organization was warning about the dangers of hotel quarantine. For every 204 infected travellers in hotel quarantine there is a leak, which is practically one out of every 200. We know that just a few infections can lead to statewide or citywide lockdowns.

We've got business owners who are also bringing really good solutions to these problems. I met with Nigel Oakey, who many would know as the managing director of Dome cafes in Western Australia. If you have an electorate in Western Australia you probably have two or three Dome cafes. They have fabulous food, great coffee and it's a lovely place to meet friends and family or have a work meeting. Nigel has done some fabulous work in terms of looking at the best-practice solutions around the world. How do we make sure that we can prevent any transmission into the community? Because that's clearly what the Australian public expect right now as they are waiting months and months for vaccines—a problem that seems to get more complex, not less, as time rolls on. So I would encourage the Prime Minister and the health minister to reach out to Nigel Oakey and have a chat to him. He has ideas that would not just help Western Australia but help this whole country.

This budget locks in $1 trillion of debt with no plan and no time line to repay it. If a small business walked into a bank and said: 'I would like to take on a few million dollars of debt. I won't tell you when I will repay it. I won't tell you what the plan is. I'm not going to tell you where the revenue will come from. I'm not going to tell you where all that money is going'—given that we have all of these dark pools of funds and the government refuses to tell us what they're going to be invested in, where they're spending that taxpayer money—they would be laughed out of the bank. Indeed, businesses in Western Australia do find this government's financial management approach concerning.

When the member for Pearce was the Treasurer for Western Australia he locked in spending that resulted in $40 billion of state debt. We're now seeing that same reckless approach amplified on a national scale, locking in huge amounts of debt with no plan to repay it, just some sort of assurance that somehow this government are good financial managers. Well, after eight years there is absolutely no evidence that this government are good financial managers. We know that when they start trying to fix their financial mess they'll start cutting health, they'll start cutting Medicare and now even the New South Wales Liberal Treasurer wants to come after Western Australia's GST. It is not good enough. This government has no plan. It just has terrible ideas like cutting Medicare and stealing WA's GST.

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