Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always a pleasure to rise in this place and speak about small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our community right across this country. They employ nearly half of the Australian workforce; they make up 95-plus per cent of businesses in Australia. It is so important that they have the opportunity to be dynamic, that they have the opportunity to grow, that they have the opportunity to employ people and, most importantly, they have the incentive, because they can see value in the future, to do all of those things. It makes our country a better place for everybody.

The bill before us, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Support for Small Business and Charities and Other Measures) Bill 2023, touches on a range of measures, including, in schedule 1, a $20,000 instant asset write-off for businesses with a turnover up to $10 million. Schedule 2 implements a bonus for small business energy incentives for small to medium businesses. Schedule 3 deals with a new class of DGR recipients. Schedule 4 make some specific DGR listings. Schedules 5, 6 and 7 deal with some other tax and superannuation related matters. Schedule 8 deals with a matter in relation to a MetLife decision codifying the applicable responsibilities of AFCA to adjudicate on certain claims within super funds.

I want to focus on the small business component of this bill. Once again, it shows that the Labor Party don't support small business and haven't done so for a long time. We see before us at present in the House an IR bill that is only going to do more damage to small business. But let's have a look at Labor's record on small business.

They've consistently turned their backs on the small-business community. When they were last in government they abolished the entrepreneur tax offset and failed to deliver a promised tax cut for small business. Labor opposed the coalition government's enterprise tax plan when first legislated, denying tax relief to millions of small-to-medium businesses. The now Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said at the time that small-business tax cuts were not worth the money and that Labor were proud to oppose those tax cuts. The now Finance Minister, Katie Gallagher, called the legislation of small-business tax cuts an absolute disgrace. In total, Labor voted against tax relief for small-to-medium businesses 15 times in the last parliament. Labor went on to promise $387 billion of extra taxes at the 2019 election. Since Anthony Albanese became Prime Minister, we have seen businesses all but abandoned under the Labor's draft national platform, and they are an afterthought in each and every budget.

Small business employs around half of Australia's private sector workforce and represents over 97 per cent of all Australian businesses. Despite running to 149 pages, Labor's platform makes only five mentions of small business, compared to 98 mentions of the union movement, 25 mentions of regulation, 28 of renewables, 15 of tax, eight of uranium, eight of the United Nations and 11 of nuclear weapons. Labor just show they simply do not understand small business. As we look at the IR bill before us in the House, there is no more evidence than that.

The coalition will support this bill, but we don't think it goes far enough. This bill decimates the instant asset write-off that the coalition brought in to assist small-to-medium business in cleaning up their balance sheets so they didn't have to run depreciation schedules and a whole bunch of paperwork and expense with their accountants each and every year. They were able to buy an asset and write it off instantaneously, thereby providing some tax incentive as well as, importantly, saving on their bookkeeping. We have moved an amendment to this provision of the bill to increase the threshold from $20,000 to $30,000, allowing businesses to claim the accelerated depreciation on a wider range of assets, and I think that is a very sensible move. It reflects our support of and encouragement of small business.

In all of this, it's important to consider the economic circumstances we find ourselves in. As we stand here today, we hear much debate about households and the cost of living for households, which is a very important issue. But our small-to-medium business sector is impacted by these cost increases as well, and we hear far less about that. Yet these are the businesses that are employing our mums and dads who are struggling with the cost of living. It's a double whammy in many cases because many of these small-to-medium business owners also have their house on the line each and every day. They're turning up and opening their doors and employing people, and more often than not the small-business owner is the last person to be paid. They pay their employees and they pay their suppliers and they are the last one to write out a check on a Friday afternoon for them and their household. I have spoken to any number of my local small businesses over the last little while about the increased cost of electricity, rent, input costs and transport costs. I was talking to a business only last week whose freight costs have gone up from about $75,000 a year to nearly $175,000 a year with no great increase in turnover or revenue. This is not even being considered when we are talking about these issues for our small businesses.

We accept that in this bill we are seeing small businesses potentially benefit from a small-business energy incentive measure. That's a modest measure to allow businesses to acquire more energy efficient appliances, put solar panels on their roofs and do all those sorts of things. All of those are sensible measures, but at the end of the day, if businesses are struggling to make ends meet, where are they going to get the money for these things in the first place? They are busy trying to keep their doors open, and we see no effort whatsoever by this government to reduce the rate of inflation and reduce interest rates so that these input costs to small business that they are paying a very high price for—and it's important to remember they generally pay a higher interest rate on their finance than people who have a mortgage do. So those small-business loan costs have had a major impact on their bottom line.

As I said before, small-business lease costs have risen in many cases around seven per cent. That is a very significant impact on their cost of doing business. At the same time we're seeing the cost-of-living crisis continue to bite into household expenditure, so a lot of these small to medium businesses—maybe they're a retail business, a cafe or a local restaurant—are seeing their customers hit by these cost-of-living increases and therefore their revenue, patronage and sales falling at the same time their costs are increasing. That is never a position you want to be in in small business. If your costs are increasing, you want your revenue to be growing at the same time, but they're not seeing that.

In addition, we have seen productivity fall over the past year by nearly four per cent. We've seen a range of cost increases on small business, and, added to that, there are increasing regulatory impacts on small business, which is also a cost that has not been quantified anywhere. At the same time we have seen this government distracted from the real job of dealing with these issues, whether it's household cost-of-living increases and the issues that arise from that or it's these issues facing small to medium business. These measures in this bill, whilst going a little way to support small to medium business, do very little to offset the actual economic impacts that are being delivered by this government not addressing the issues of rising interest rates, rising inflation, rising energy costs and a range of other measures. I think it is incumbent on this government to get back to basics and focus on the job that they need to do to deal with these cost-of-living issues.

In comparison, the coalition government had a great track record in supporting small business with energy costs. The coalition had ensured affordable and reliable power for small business and recognised it was critical to enable them to prosper, grow and create more jobs in the Australian economy. In office, the coalition delivered tailored advice to help small business find the best energy deals available and use energy more efficiently. The current government scrapped it. Reducing energy prices for small business by introducing the default market offer was another measure of the coalition government to ensure small businesses were protected from excessively high prices and had a reference price when searching for an energy provider.

The coalition government provided small family businesses with grants of up to $20,000 to help them with their energy costs and invest in technology to reduce their energy consumption. The coalition helped high-energy-using businesses to improve their energy efficiency and save on energy costs by delivering grants of up to $25,000. The coalition invested in future energy technology that would support jobs, strengthen our economy and reduce emissions. This not only cut emissions but also delivered reliable energy for Australia, which it needs to ensure that you have a continued reduction in the price of electricity and that the cost of electricity to businesses and households continues to fall. They are just some of the measures that the coalition government put in place to ensure that we supported small to medium businesses not just through the tax system but through the energy system and ensure they are able to meet their commitments to be successful and employ the Australian people.

As I said, we're not going to oppose this bill, but we are proposing an amendment to increase the threshold for accelerated depreciation from $20,000 to $30,000, and I commend that amendment to the House. More importantly—and I want to finish on this note—once again we are seeing that it is the coalition that is standing here, making amendments to a bill in order to improve outcomes for small to medium sized businesses. Those opposite in the government do not understand small business, don't care for small business and are beholden to their unions. Through other bills in this House they will seek to continue to damage small to medium sized businesses well into the future. The sooner we have a coalition government back to look after small to medium sized businesses, the better for this country.

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