Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Making sugar, yes. I was an accountant and I'm still in the cattle game as we speak.

Our side understands business. The last thing we ever want to do is lose our employees. They're the key people. Your greatest fear is your key employees going. If your key employees go, your business goes. This change that has been brought forward—I know you have to square up with people. Everybody has distinct interest groups, and I completely understand the unions are a distinct interest group of the Labor Party. I've got that. But this is overkill. This is going way over the top, because it is going to have an effect beyond what you perceive.

In so many areas businesses are also multigenerational, and the impost that comes onto them has to be understood. Family businesses—we're also pushed around a lot by big businesses because we have to compete in their marketplace. They can go out and put on their overheads to cover their expenses and force their price onto the market. We're price takers, and the decisions they make are basically offloaded onto us. Ultimately, we always say, 'Oh, yes, it's offloaded to the consumer.' Sometimes, yes, but usually it's just a price cut to the small business. They just take the hit.

The classic one right now, for instance—I don't know what you're paying for meat in the supermarkets, but it's a lot. The other day there were people selling sheep up in Armidale for five bucks a head. Someone's making a bucketload, and it's not the farmers. This goes to show that the people who will be able to deal with this legislation are the people who are just going to force the price onto the consumer. That's where it's going to end up. And there hasn't been a big enough carve out by the government to properly understand the smaller businesses, to properly understand the people who this is going to hurt. For our part, we'll plead to the government to re-engage, especially with the smaller businesses, in such a way as those smaller businesses stay in the marketplace because that gives you market dynamism, it gives your economy dynamism, and it gives the capacity for people to grow.

I was talking to a big business the other day, but a big business that started many, many years ago as a small business—we've got a few of them. What I always find frustrating when I talk to them—they say, 'It'll be very unlikely that this will happen again, like we did it.' These people employ, to be honest, thousands. They said, 'The reason is the government now has so much regulation in place that any approval, anything we need to do would just be confounded by the bureaucracy that a start-up would have to deal with.'

Let's go back to the member for Flynn. If someone found coal and wanted to start a mine, it would be near impossible because all the approvals they would need to have to get that thing started is not possible. So what you're actually doing, when you come up with new regulations like we have here today, is you're saying, 'The only people who will be in the marketplace are the established players, the people who can cover those overheads.' The mums and dads and the boilermaker and the fitter and turner and the diesel mechanic—they're the ones most likely to go out and have a crack at it. It's the tradespeople who actually go on to grow businesses, but you're making it incredibly tough for them to be their own boss because, apart from being a sole trader, as soon as they start employing people, although they understand they have got to be decent, fair and safe, but if the legal requirements become excessive, the motivation to do so is completely lost.

What will happen with this legislation as it filters through is that people who are near the tipping point will be very present in smaller towns, in the pub that is just making it, in the motel that is just making it or in the corner store that is just making it. Even though they might not be directly affected this legislation, they will be indirectly affected because it flows through the economy. They're the ones that will get tipped over. How does it flow through? It flows through because the cost they cannot get out of ends up on their P and L, and often the P and L goes from just being in profit to just being in loss, and the loss is just before you go out of business. The people who can wear this cost, the bigger businesses, will shift it straight down the line to the smaller businesses. You say the small businesses are not covered because they only have a couple of workers. Well, they are affected because they have to pick up that margin, and so they pick up that margin on their P and L, which forces them out the door.

You need to think about what you are doing in a holistic way—just sit back and think about it. Power prices are an abomination. You have power prices going through the roof because you have a massive investment in so-called renewables. They are not renewables because they're going to end up in landfill. That investment demands a return, and the return it demands is seen in the power bill, which is a massive cost for small business. For gas, it's the same thing—more restrictions, you don't open up more areas, restrictions apply, price goes up, cost goes back to the small business. You're going to buy back water licences, which takes the cash out of the economy, and that cost goes back to small business. And now you have this legislation coming through. You might say small business is not covered, but the big businesses are, and they will put it on their bill, which goes back to small business. In the end, the small businesses cop it.

In New England, where small business is incredibly important, especially in a place such as the biggest city in my electorate, Tamworth, the motto is industry, and we're very proud of it. They say about New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. In Tamworth, we say if you can't make it here, you'll make it nowhere. We love the idea that, if you have a go, you take the trade you have learnt in life and set up in Taminda or in Nemingha, you should have an opportunity to be your own boss. That's what people want, to be their own boss, the master of their own ship. They want to have their own corporate manual and to wear their own uniform or their own type of hi-vis. This is what people want because the ultimate freedom is to be master of your own ship. That is the philosophical attraction to small business. Even though you might make more money in the big corporate world, you love the idea of being your own boss. But to do that, you need a government that understands that to make that available to people who want the fundamental freedom to be master of their own ship, to chart their own course, they need to be as free as possible. The core thing is that the job we have here as members of the Nationals, regardless of your education or the luck of your family or the wealth that they might have attained, you will transcend through the economic and social stratification of life to your highest level, limited only by your innate ability. If you can do that, you'll be free, and freedom is what drives us. All my colleagues have said so much about this fair work legislation. But on a philosophical basis I say the more regulations you place on people trying to get on in business, the more you restrict their freedom.

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