Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the wonderful Minister for Small Business. I would like to thank the Minister for Small Business for coming out to Lindsay recently to meet with 100 business owners. Will the minister please outline to the House how cutting red tape will make life easier for the almost 10,000 small businesses in my electorate of Lindsay and elsewhere in Australia?

Mr Fitzgibbon interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Hunter will desist. I call the honourable the Minister for Small Business, be he wonderful or not!

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the wonderful member for Lindsay; what a great job she is doing representing the small businesses in her community. And it is not surprising; like this side of the House, small business runs through her veins. She knows that excessive compliance burden and red tape costs land most heavily on the smaller enterprises. That is why we made the commitment to cut $1 billion worth of red tape. But not only have we done what we said we were going to do; we have doubled the amount of red tape and compliance cost savings—more than 400 separate measures, $2.1 billion worth of compliance tax savings right across the role of government and the work of our agencies. The demands government makes on small business, the one-stop shop streamlining so we can get those projects and opportunities more in reach of small businesses.

Ms Rowland interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Greenway is not in her seat and may not speak.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the area of tax more than 440,000 small businesses will benefit from changes to entry thresholds for GST and PAYG reporting. That is $63 million worth of compliance savings. In areas of the Corporations Act the silly idea that you need to appoint and retain an auditor for certain corporations that do not actually need to conduct an audit. These are logical and sensible changes. The way in which small business deals with government, the single business service entry point, our work on the Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, moving the Small Business Superannuation Clearing House out of the fog in Medicare, where no small business would think to go, into the ATO. We have seen a 24 per cent increase in the use of that service. Our own contracting—simplifying contract documents. Paying bills on time. If they are too late after 30 days and under $1 million, we should be paying interest because we should not improve the Commonwealth's cash flow off the back of small business. Even in the way businesses deal with each other. The franchise reforms not only improving and strengthening that franchise code but an $8.6 million savings in compliance costs. Fixing the Personal Property Securities Register, fixing the damage of Labor's hashed effort to mess around with employee share streams and streamlining the arrangements of making those within reach of small businesses.

There is more work to do. Labor's own paid parental leave scheme—why do we have to have employers handling those payments twice when the government is already processing those payments and sending them not to the recipient but to a business to double handle under the threat of a fine. Why do that? There is another $48 million worth of savings there. So, while Labor is politicking and making an awful lot of noise, we are tackling pointless, overreaching, economy-clagging regulation. No-one benefits more from that than the small businesses whose job it has been and continues to be the creation of jobs and opportunities and recovering the 519,000 jobs lost in small business under Labor.