Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am a proud Victorian. I am the proud son of small-business owners. My father, who is in his 70s, runs a small business as a roof plumber and still climbs up multiple-storey roofs and is doing his best to survive in Victoria. In my home seat of Menzies I recently visited small businesses in my electorate, and I will tell you what you see when you walk through their doors. More often than not you see a family that wasn't born here. You see a family that is first in and last to leave, that pays their staff first and them last, that is struggling under the crippling weight of excessive taxes in Victoria and that is paying record energy bills, with gas up 26 per cent and electricity up 18 per cent, and when you compound that over many years—I walked into a dry-cleaner, and they said, 'My gas bill is six times what it used to be.' In the corner you'll often see their children doing homework, trying to have a better life. That's what small business is about. Small business is about a bet on your family, on your future and on Australia. For this government to be bloody-minded about extending the instant asset write-off from $20,000 to $30,000 shows they are taking small business for granted, and they are taking, in my home state of Victoria, migrant families for granted.

In the last financial year Victoria was the only state in Australia that saw the growth of small businesses go backwards. In the last financial year we saw a decrease of 7,600 Victorian small businesses. Of course, there is a churn and new businesses who come and fail because they've taken a risk and it didn't work out, but year after year, in state after state, there's an aggregate increase except in Victoria. In that same year when Victoria lost 7,600 businesses my friends in Queensland saw theirs grow by 11,000. One of the things that's happening there is that Victorian small businesses are leaving our state and moving north. We've seen this movie play out before; we saw it play out in the early 1990s.

I say to the Victorian members—and there are a lot of them over there; there are not many over here: you are taking your state, your seats and your communities for granted, and they notice. Victorian small-business owners are on their knees. They need you, and they need this small increase. It's not much. It's an extra bit of equipment, a second-hand van, a new coffee machine, a folding press.

I will give an example. I spoke to a small business in my electorate called Fratelli Engineering, a proud Italian family run business in Box Hill North. They have employed many people, including people who are learning their trades. They're teaching them, taking that risk and taking that bet on them growing their business. They're not only bearing the brunt of increased costs and increased taxes; they're trying desperately to compete with the almighty weight of the state and the huge infrastructure costs that come with it. They're trying to compete with people who are earning over $200,000 holding a sign on union construction sites—and they can't. But we know when those construction projects are finished the small business is gone; it may have gone to Queensland or it may disappear forever. We can't continuously fund Victorian employment through big state construction projects. We can't continuously fund all the areas we need in the care economy if we're just going to rely on the state to generate employment.

To those opposite: Victoria needs you. Victorian small business needs you. For the migrant families in my electorate, including many from the Chinese community who had an expo on the weekend—and I single out Laura and Aaron Qin, from Ausfocus, who ran that on the weekend. I spoke to those small-business members, and they feel like they're being taken for granted. Don't be bloody-minded. Stand up for Victorians. Increase the threshold from $20,000 to $30,000. They need it, and they need it in Victoria more than ever.

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