Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to rise to speak to this motion by the member for Casey. For those listening at home, it in effect says that Australian small businesses are at breaking point and have been failed by this government. It points out that, in my state of New South Wales alone, 4,635 businesses have closed over the last 12 months, and that this government, the Labor-Green-teal government, is now the worst government on record for Australian businesses, having surpassed the 10,757 businesses collapsing under the government of 2011-12.

It gives me no joy to speak about this, having been in business myself for 16 years and knowing how tough business is. I remember going through the GFC in 2008 and 2009, paying my employees, paying rent which was nothing like rents these days, paying electricity bills which were nothing like electricity bills these days and going home and saying to my wife—and this is a true story—'We don't have any money this fortnight; this is really tough.' I look back on those days, and they are nothing like now.

Last Saturday I went into a local coffee shop, which people in the metropolitan areas would call a hole in the wall. It's got a fridge. It's got a coffee machine. It's got lights. I spoke to the owner. I said, 'How are things going?' and she said, 'My electricity bill went from $4,000 a quarter to $6,000 a quarter,' for a hole in the wall in Maxwell. She's got employees—and she's saying the same thing about the butcher around the corner. But I guess she's lucky. She's getting through and still coping because she has a very strong, established business.

There are other businesses out there, like Wicked Elf Beer in Port Macquarie, who'd been around for a decade. They closed their doors as a direct result of this government's rush to renewables and energy policy. After 10 years they shut the door because their electricity bill was higher than their rental bill. This was a brewery eight times—10 times—the size of this room, and they had to shut down. People lost their jobs.

When we come into this room and talk about what the government is doing, there's actually human emotion at stake. These people have families and children that go to schools in the local areas. Then the government implements industrial relations laws that allow union representatives to come into your workplace and tie you up in knots on a suspicion—not a reasonable suspicion, just a suspicion—that you might not be doing the right thing. Even through 12 years in the police, I had to have a reasonable suspicion to stop somebody or talk to somebody. They can walk in and tie business owners up in knots. Those people—those mums and dads or generational businesses—don't have the money for lawyers, so they have to spend hundreds of hours wasting time rather than getting on with business. There is no doubt that the reason we are seeing these statistics of closures in record numbers—you've seen in the construction industry alone a 111 per cent increase in the closure of construction companies—is a direct result of the poor policies of Labor, the Greens and the teals, who don't understand business.

The Treasurer himself—and I do not believe that he had the gall to say this—said he lasted six long, long months in private industry. What an insult to private industry and small business, who are the backbone of our economies, particularly in regional and rural areas. The Treasurer should hang his head in shame, and the government should hang their head in shame for what they've done to small business.

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