Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to invoke a point of order here: the member for Reid was looking at me all the way through that speech! I rise to speak on behalf of the people of Townsville and to thank the shadow minister for small business, Bruce Billson, for coming to Townsville last week. We had a fantastic visit where we went to the Townsville Chamber of Commerce and small businesses around the city and hosted a small business forum. I would like to highlight a couple of things that have come out of that. Firstly, the concern from small business all the way through is a lack of confidence. You cannot say what confidence looks like, smells like or feels like but, by jingo, you know exactly when it has gone. You know exactly when it is missing. That is what people in Townsville are telling us about small business at the moment. It is very, very hard to stand up and put your job on the line and your house on the line to create a small business.

A problem with small business compliance and the overregulation of small business by this government and the previous state Labor government has come to the fore. Accountants and solicitors are now de facto compliance officers and government tax collectors at all levels of government. Those professionals should be there helping businesses to borrow, maximise their returns and think of ways they can do things smarter and quicker.

A friend of mine is doing a Bachelor of Business at James Cook University in Townsville. In one lecture there were 45 people. It was on small business. The lecturer asked, 'Who here wants to end up with their own small business?' He asked them to put their hands up. One person out of 45 said that they wanted to go into small business. I think that that is an indictment on the way we are going at the moment. Very few people will go into it. We are not seeing the children of small business people going into business.

A mate of mine started a small business in trucks. He started with a ute and a maroon shirt because he played for Souths in Townsville. He made that work because he worked very, very hard and was prepared to go without. He looks back at that now and he says that, even if he was the same age with the same energy and the same drive now, he would not be able to make that business work today because of the regulations and rules that you have to follow. All of those sorts of things add to the cost of running a small business.

The carbon tax is a big issue for small business. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency stood up at a press conference and said removing the floor price was actually going to give business certainty. I do not know if the minister was around during the foreign currency loans issue but, when we floated the dollar, people who had rural loans in foreign currency lost their farms. If you are going to tie a floating currency to a scheme on another continent, you want to make sure that your dollar is going to be high forever. If we go down to 75c or 60c, it would be great for our farmers but, if the euro goes up, that $29 a tonne is going to become $50 a tonne very, very quickly and for no reason.

Reduced red tape is something that we believe should happen. I am pleased to see that Campbell Newman came out and said during his campaign that he will reduce 75,000 pages of red tape. On our own side we have Senator Sinodinos and the member for Higgins going around the country actively looking for rules and regulations that should be pulled out. We know that former Prime Minister Rudd when he came into power said, 'One in, one out.' So far for every regulation that has gone out we have had about 18,000 in. That is not too bad. It is probably as close as you guys will ever get.

We would like to review the competition laws. We believe that small business needs a review of the policy on how they go about lodging complaints when they feel that they have been hard done by and how those complaints are heard. Too often small businesses, even when they are right, will walk away from a complaint when they know that they have a case purely because it is too expensive. They get belted up by big business or by a set of solicitors and they cannot pursue their claim. That has to be looked at for small business and those wrongs must be righted.

We have to look at a simpler award system, with one for small business including plain English. You cannot even get Fair Work Australia to give you the award rates these days. Even if you ring them and ask the question and ask for the answer in writing and they give it to you they still say that they can be wrong and that you will still be penalised. Those are the things that we need to fix.