Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure to rise to speak in support of my friend the member for Casey's motion, although it's no pleasure, obviously, to discuss what we're discussing, which is small business insolvency—and I wish that wasn't happening.

It's often been said that small business is the engine room of the economy. That's true. We could have a discussion about why that is. Why are small businesses the engine room of the economy? There are so many of them, of course. They're traditionally very high in productivity. This is due to several factors, including the fact that a small business is flexible and able to adapt to market change. Also—this is probably the key thing—the financial stakeholders of a small business are often the managers. They are often families. The level of personal risk that these small-business people put themselves under leads to extremely hard work, innovation and very high productivity. I have many small businesses in my electorate: farms, shops, small manufacturers and service businesses. A lot of them involve agriculture and food manufacturing.

The tragedy in Australia at the moment is that small business insolvencies are up, and that's not good for Australia. Let's have a think about why small-business insolvencies are up. I'm sure all of us are talking to our small-business communities. They are telling us that they're finding business very hard at the moment. We've got an inflationary environment, and that's making things tough. Input costs are up. One of the causes of this is government spending, and there's lower overall productivity in the economy. There's an expanded public sector taking key workers away from private enterprise. Input costs are up, especially energy. Gas and electricity are more expensive. Insurance is more expensive. In many cases, the infrastructure is not keeping up. The road network is not doing what it needs to do to make sure small business, particularly in my area, can get its produce to where it needs to go.

One of the things that is really frustrating the small businesses that I talk to is the industrial relations changes. The small businesses I talk to are really worried about the regulatory burden that this is going to put upon them. It's easier for a corporation to deal with that. They've got a huge HR department, and they can try and work through the morass of extra legislation that exists as a result of the new government. Put yourself in the shoes of a small business that's got to try and work through all of that. It's really hard. They can't afford to hire big costly HR departments, so they've often got to be up really late doing that themselves. Also, flexibility is reduced with these new IR laws, particularly in relation to casual employees. That really hurts small businesses, who need that flexibility.

The other thing small business tells me is that, increasingly, everyone seems to want to clip the ticket of what they do. For a hardworking small business—let's say they're an apple grower, a dairy farmer or a food manufacturer—dealing with the number of government bureaucracies that want to come in and add a cost to their business and have cost recovery just makes it harder and harder. These people feel that their work is not being respected. They feel, 'The government is just feeding off my hard work, my risk and my effort by sending a bunch of bureaucrats in there to make sure I'm compliant with this and that, and to make sure I've followed this regulation.' We're not going to get more small businesses by doing that. A fruit grower that I spoke to earlier today said to me, 'Sam, it seems like it's death by a thousand cuts.'

We're so risk averse, as a society, We're also worried about what the government's going to do to us, even if we make an innocent mistake. We spend so much on self-regulation now that it's tying us up in knots. It kills productivity. Productivity lifts profitability, and that lifts everyone's living standards. The policies we have seen from this government are not supporting that aim.

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