Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I just ask everyone to imagine walking into their favourite local coffee shop—for the member for Jagajaga here it might be in Heidelberg—grabbing a coffee and some breakfast and saying, 'Actually, I'll be back in 90 days to pay you.' Imagine going to your favourite local gift shop—I'd suggest Endeavour Hills Shopping Centre; there's an excellent gift shop there—buying a gift for your mum and saying, 'Actually, thanks for that, I'm going to take that now and I'll be back next March to pay you.' That is unthinkable and it's also wrong, just as it should be wrong for big business to long delay payments for small businesses.

Cash flow and payment times are absolutely critical for small businesses. It's simply unfair for big business to delay payments. Late payments are a major stress, and it's incredibly wasteful of the time of small-business owners and operators for them to have to spend time chasing and chasing the accounts departments of big businesses that just don't seem to care. Small business is critical to the Australian economy—more than $500 billion of economic value. More than 2.5 million individual small businesses are creating more than five million jobs and employing more than five million Australians in those jobs.

I would say, at the outset, something about one of the silliest things that we hear from those opposite. It is a very long list; I wouldn't say this is at the top. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy over there would probably talk about nuclear power and so on. That is pretty silly. But one of the silliest things we hear consistently is their schtick, their claim, their brand propaganda that somehow the Liberals are the party of small business. It's just nonsense. I say unequivocally, if you actually look at the at the record—not announcements, not the spin, but actually what the Labor Party has done in government and the difference between the last government and this government—Labor is the party of small business. Those opposite run this line that no-one over here on this side has ever worked in a small business and that no-one over here has ever run a small business. That's also simply not true. It doesn't matter; they just keep saying it because it is part of their brand propaganda and shtick.

I worked in a small business. It was my university job. It was tough. My mum actually chose not to go back to nursing. She tried, but, when my dad died, she just couldn't make the shiftwork balance with caring for my brother and I. So she worked for some decades in a small business doing accounts, stock control and sales. I ended up doing that as my university job and saw firsthand the stress of the cashflow impacts, the way that you have to balance payments and the impact when suppliers are simply not paying you on time.

Many government members—the employment minister, for instance—have operated their own small businesses, and many of our current ministers have husbands, wives or partners who operate small businesses—the Minister for Small Business, for instance.

To be very clear, when you strip it back, the core purpose of the Liberal Party has never changed. It's to protect those who already have the most accumulated wealth. That's the thing that sets them completely off. The other thing that sets them off, of course, is changes that are fair to workers. That's another speech.

But I'll stand on the government's record. This bill exemplifies that. The context is important. The budget, which complements that, will ease the pressure on 2.5 million Australian small businesses, providing more than $640 million in practical and targeted support. The payment time changes are important, but so is the government's initiative to invest $290 million, extending the $20,000 instant asset write-off, making it easier for small business to invest and grow. They like to claim that on the opposition side as one of their policies. They conveniently forget that it was the Rudd and Gillard government who put that measure in. Then the Liberals got elected and Tony Abbott scrapped it, until we embarrassed them into putting it back. But they like to pretend it was theirs.

The bill overhauls the payment times—

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