Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on behalf of approximately 400 small businesses across Australia who support well over 19,000 Australians with employment and contribute a whopping $2.4 billion to our national GDP. I speak of the firearms industry. These small businesses service more than 868,000 licensed firearm owners: Aussie farmers; sporting shooters, including gold medallists; and recreational hunters, who remove pests and abundant species from our landscape. They are lawful Australian businesses which are heavily regulated, and rightly so, but I'm standing to speak of the unnecessary, unlawful discrimination against licensed firearm traders from our banking and financial sector, as well as from social media providers. Far too many small businesses in the firearms industry are encountering obstacles in securing basic financial services and using online platforms.

Financial institutions such as banks, EFTPOS and buy-now pay-later providers play a pivotal role in business transactions today, and it's worth pointing out that, quite often, firearms businesses in remote, rural and regional areas are combined with other services. For example, a firearms dealer might also have a service mix that includes providing essential services like fuel, mechanical repairs, agricultural necessities et cetera. So the decision to decline financial services to a small business for ill-considered reasons robs that rural and regional community of these essential services. As I mentioned, it's not just financial services that are being denied to these businesses. Social media platforms, which have become all but essential to any business in this day and age, have also thrown up barriers to these businesses, thereby exacerbating the issues faced by firearms dealers who operate as small businesses.

Regulation on the firearms industry is the role of government. Further requirements on these legitimate, lawful businesses actually undermine the efforts of government in this matter. Firearms businesses are operating under strict, stringent legislation and oversight. It's not a role for banks, payment providers, services or social media platforms to impose their own conditions above those that government imposes. Businesses within the firearm industry have the right to operate, promote and grow their business using financial services and social media platforms like anyone else operating within the law.

It's about time, quite frankly, that banks in particular started focusing more on their social responsibility, particularly to their rural and regional customers, by keeping branches open, rather than denying rural and regional businesses based on their corporate and social responsibility policies which overstep the bank's role in society. It's blatant discrimination, and I stand here with the industry and its customers in calling it out.

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