Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want Australia to be the best place in the world to start and grow a business. And we can be, but currently we're not. If we are going to realise this opportunity, we must listen to the businesses we already have in this country and really understand what they need in order to do better.

If you talk to businesses, as I have recently in Wentworth, they talk about what makes them successful. We've got a lot of great businesses that are doing well. They say, 'Look, to even survive or to thrive I need to focus on my customers, I need to focus on my suppliers and I need to work with my team.' What they say to me constantly is, 'Government needs to get out of the way or make it easy for me to do my job.' That's really what this parliament needs to do much, much better on because, frankly, businesses are having a hard time right now. Small businesses are having a disproportionately hard time right now, and we in this parliament are not doing enough to support them.

We can see that in the data. We see that the number of insolvencies in Australia is higher than ever before. Of those that survived, we still see that almost half of small businesses are considering closing in the next 12 months. But we also see that in who is going into business. We see that small businesses are now only 30 per cent of the economy, when back in 2006 they were 40 per cent of the economy. We see that the proportion of young people under 30 operating a small or family business has halved since 1976. Fewer people are seeing small businesses as a pathway for their careers. This is really tragic. It's tragic at a personal level for people, but it is also a problem at an economy level. The e61 Institute has shown that productivity, an issue that we have in this country, is driven by new and emerging businesses—young, dynamic firms. But, if young people aren't starting these firms and aren't going into business, we won't have those drivers of productivity which help the entire economy. We need to be fostering these businesses.

There are four things that I think we as a parliament need to fight for. These are the four things that I'm fighting for for small and medium businesses. Firstly, we need better access to business finance to build the innovative businesses of tomorrow and to back our Australian businesses. Australia has a chronic investment shortfall for young firms despite having one of the largest pension schemes in the world. In the last decade the proportion of private equity investment and superannuation funds has halved from 60 per cent to 30 per cent. This will be made worse if self-managed super funds are taxed on unrealised gains. But it's not just high-growth tech firms that are struggling. It's also about young people with a great business idea but without their own home to offer as collateral, who are struggling. When banks tell me that business lending is red-hot right now, the data tells a different story. It shows that business lending is going to the bigger businesses. It is not going to the small and medium businesses that it needs to go to.

Secondly, the award system has become far too complex and needs urgent streamlining. Most businesses are not maliciously underpaying workers in the small and medium businesses I talk to, but, frankly, they are struggling with the complexity of the award system. My niece came to me and asked if she was being paid right as a cafe worker. It took me 20 minutes, and I've employed a lot of people in my time. We need to have a simplified award system, and this government could be the government to lead on this. We need to take further steps to make it easy for people to employ people, and make it easy for employers and employees to know if their pay is right.

Thirdly, the government needs to be an ally of small businesses, and that means not being an enemy. It means really looking at the regulatory settings to ensure that they're proportional and appropriate for small businesses. Government could also better use its own procurement practices to make sure that it doesn't procure from big businesses who aren't paying small business on time, as well as opening up more procurement to small businesses who are trying to get a leg into government procurement, though it's a very complex system.

Lastly, we need to simplify and improve the tax system for small businesses. We need permanent tax supports in place that incentivise small businesses to invest and grow, rather than this annual politicking that we see each year around instant asset write-offs. We also need to harmonise or remove payroll tax. It hits business twice—both as a financial tax on each additional worker and as an administrative tax—due to the discrepancy across the different jurisdictions.

The challenges of small business aren't new, but they are growing, and we in this parliament need to step up. The major parties are timid on these issues, whether it be tax or fundamentally making awards work for businesses and for employees. They need to step up on these key issues, and I will continue to push them.

See this speech in context