Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Small business plays a crucial role in the Australian economy. According to the Small business data report: 2023 year in review, approximately 42 per cent of private sector employment is in the small business sector. Small business adds one-third of gross value. It accounts for 97½ per cent of all businesses, roughly 2½ million, and it generates $500 billion of economic activity. That's a third of Australia's gross domestic product. They are big numbers. They are impressive figures. And we should, as the member for Chisholm has just stated, do everything we can to help small business. And I hear, hear, hear from the member for Moreton. He knows how important small business is in his Queensland community.

Last week, we heard—and we welcomed, indeed—the member for Chifley, the Minister for Industry and Science, saying that small businesses need some tax relief—some more tax relief, in fact. He said that the corporate tax rate should be lowered. He's not here this week. Maybe he's been sent for reprogramming by the Treasurer, who I'm not quite sure totally agreed with the member for Chifley's assessment of where the corporate tax rate is or should be, but no doubt the member for Chifley will consider the error of his ways when he goes against the member for Rankin. I say that very facetiously; I wouldn't want people to think I don't believe the corporate tax rate should be lowered, because when I was the small-business minister back in 2016 the small-business tax rate went down to its lowest level in 70 years. I was very proud of that.

As I just said—and the member for Chisholm agreed in her contribution—we should do everything we can to support, to promote and to enhance small business because it's small-business people who take the risk. It's small-business people who open the doors, who pay the rent, who pay the wages. Now they're having to pay even more wages after the announcement this week by the Fair Work Commission that wages are to go up by 3¾ per cent. No-one denies workers should be paid their dues, but it comes on the back of small business; they then have to find, in a cost-of-living crisis, more to pay their workers. What do they do? Do they put the price of their products up? Do they put the cost of their services up? Who ultimately pays for that? It's the consumer, the customer. Someone has to pay. Whether it's superannuation or wages, it's that small-business operator—that person who often pays their employees first, as they should; who puts away money for their superannuation, as they should; and who often gets paid less in small business than the person they employ to help run their shop. I pay tribute and credit to those small-business operators. They are risk-takers. In many cases—that is, farmers—they are price-takers, not price-makers, and they are certainly risk-takers because they operate on the smell of an oily rag. They operate on the whim of the weather gods. They operate on whether or not there are going to be good times in the economy.

We're talking about payment times reporting. Indeed, anything that can be done to ensure payment times are what they should be has got to be considered very much on its merit and very much supported by the coalition. But let's just consider the 4 June Daily Telegraph editorial, which was headed, 'Insolvencies are climbing and could send NSW broke'. Luke Achterstraat was the co-writer of this; he is the chief executive officer of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, so when he speaks we ought to listen. It was co-authored by Denita Wawn—someone very well known to me—the CEO of Master Builders Australia. And she and he, like the good member for Chifley, bell the cat. He calls for a lower corporate tax rate. They, in a very what could be called grim article, wrote about the shocking insolvency figures released just last week detailing the crisis facing small business in my home state of New South Wales:

ASIC's latest insolvency statistics provides the horrid figure of almost 4000 NSW businesses going bust in the year to date—

That's what they wrote; that was the second sentence in that very alarming article—

Business insolvencies in NSW are now up 61 per cent year on year.

In the same week the NSW government has set ambitious housing targets to be met, the sobering news is construction industry insolvencies are up 111 per cent from this time last year.

And we have a housing minister who talks about increasing the housing stock. I don't necessarily disagree with her, but, when you've got state governments shutting down gas, when you've got state governments like Victoria stopping the timber industry, I wonder how this is going to be met by the housing industry when they are trying to power homes, when they are trying to construct homes. What in goodness knows name will they be building houses out of if they can't use Australian timber? What we'll do is we'll import it. We'll just rape and pillage rainforests overseas to get the timber we need to build houses to accommodate the numbers of migration, which are just not sustainable. The numbers are just not sustainable. In fact, in January and February alone, we welcomed—and I do use the word 'welcomed'—more than 100,000 new citizens in each of those months, as part of the overseas migration intake. That number is equivalent to the yearly total of migrants during the Howard era. This comes on the back of a cost-of-living crisis. This comes on the back of a housing crisis.

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