Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion from the member for Forde, Mr van Manen, which notes in part that 96 per cent of all of Australian businesses are small businesses, employing more than 4.5 million people and producing more than $330 billion of the nation's economic output. Of particular interest is that in 2013-14 Australians started more than 280,000 new small businesses.

I have spoken many times in this place about the dynamism of the small business sector in my electorate of Ryan. Ryan is full of creative, smart people who are achieving innovative outcomes. It is therefore no coincidence that we have more than our share of small business success stories. The coalition government understands that businesses—not governments—employ people. Indeed, smart people can lead to smarter commercial outcomes when backed by smart government policy. That is why this year's budget was so warmly welcomed by small businesses in my electorate. They welcomed the tax cut for small businesses and they welcomed the ability to immediately deduct expenditure on items of capital equipment with a value of up to $20,000. They welcomed the array of other cuts to red tape that make it so much easier for small businesses to employ and, importantly, to grow.

The coalition government believes in small business because, with a combination of good management and good government policy—and perhaps, sometimes, some good luck—the small businesses of today can become the big businesses of tomorrow. When I travel around my electorate I am frequently inspired by the creative spirit of new small businesses and their owners. In the last sitting week I spoke about Ryan-based start-up, Ethos, a family-owned company that has developed an app to help companies improve their workplace culture. In recent weeks I have visited Ethos to congratulate husband-and-wife team, Andrew and Connor Baillie, for successfully securing a $209,000 grant from the Commonwealth to further commercialise their app.

Small businesses come in all shapes and sizes, and so too their customers. There is no truer example of this than Jogs for Dogs, a new Ryan small business catering for the canine segment of the exercise market. Jogs for Dogs provides an exercise service in Brisbane's western suburbs to help dog owners provide their dog with regular physical and mental stimulation and socialisation. For their canine clients, they offer nature walks, dog park play dates or private walks. This is a great initiative that caters to caring, but time-poor, dog lovers who do not have the ability or time to give their dogs the exercise they need.

Talking about small businesses growing to be bigger businesses, I want to pay tribute to people like Julia Matusik, who started off with a small stall at the monthly Moggill Markets at Brookfield, where she had delicious temptations for us once a month. Julia has now expanded to a shop at Kenmore, where not only is she open every day of the week with wonderful temptations but she now employs several staff, including chefs, to cater for the business that she has grown and, indeed, expanded into a catering service as well.

There are so many new and innovative ideas. I know of a new business that has grown up out of some of our larger furniture shops, where they offer to pick up your order and put it together. Perhaps 20 years ago we would not have thought of a flat-pack service, but now that is a thriving small business. There are many other companies expanding and being innovative in this space.

I applaud the many and varied small businesses in my electorate for not only having a good idea but for being courageous enough to take a risk to make their idea a reality. In doing so they add vibrancy to our local community and provide thousands of local jobs. I look at the people from Cafe Tara, who started at The Gap and have now expanded to a second shopfront in Kenmore, where they have opened up a coffee shop for locals in a different suburb.

The coalition government is proud to stand side-by-side with small businesses, and has taken clear and decisive action to ensure that they are provided with the right taxation and regulatory environment to give them the best chance of success. Indeed, it is said of small businesses in our country that if only half of them employed one more person then we would not have an employment problem. I commend this motion to the House.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak for a second time on the private member's motion moved by Mr van Manen.

Leave granted.

I am really pleased to speaking today on this private member's motion about small business. Colleagues here would be aware of my passion for the 10,746 small businesses in my community and the goods and services and especially the jobs that they create.

Last week I was delighted to be the guest speaker at the Calamvale Business Network annual cocktail function, which was held at Calamvale Community College. The group meets quarterly to discuss local issues, to develop relationships and to work out ways to give back to the local community. Their contribution to Calamvale and suburbs around it is a prime example of the important work done by small businesses in my area to really strengthen our community.

That is true of the national economy as well. Small business employs 4.5 million Australians and is a serious driver of opportunity, growth and innovation. Eighty-five per cent of innovative firms in Australia are small businesses, underpinning the importance of the sector to developing the ingenuity our economy needs to power it into the future. Government has an important role to get the tax, regulation and support systems for small business right to foster new jobs, new ideas and new prosperity for the Australian economy. It is in this spirit that Labor supported the government's small business package through the House this year. We were pleased to see the government restore Labor's accelerated depreciation scheme, if only for a limited period of time, as compared to Labor's permanent measure. We also support a reduction in the company tax rate for small businesses with a turnover of less than $2 million.

But, while the government pats themselves on the back for their work, Labor believes there is more to be done to get our small business policy environment right. We have already outlined some of our key priorities for future small business policy. The Leader of the Opposition said in the budget reply that both sides of parliament should be pushing to reduce the company tax rate for small businesses down to 25 per cent. We have also announced a plan to support more start-ups, especially in science, technology, engineering and maths.

Labor will work with the banks and the finance industry to develop Start-Up Finance, a partial guarantee scheme which will improve access to finance for Australian microbusinesses. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has estimated that tech start-ups could add $109 billion to the Australian economy and create 540,000 new jobs by 2033. We believe that government has a role to support start-up formation, and to help start-ups commercialise and grow. These are some of the key small business policies that have been announced already by the Shorten Labor opposition.

We will be continuing to develop plans to improve the policy environment for small businesses in Australia. Something that I am personally passionate about is to help small businesses engage with international markets better than they can currently. As it stands, only nine per cent of Australian businesses are currently operating in Asia, and two-thirds of businesses have no intention of engaging with Asia in the near future because of the various obstacles that exist. Those obstacles are magnified when you contemplate the lack of scale that many of our small businesses have in this country. Clearly, we need to do better to encourage Australian businesses to take advantage of the huge market in our region.

Another issue relates to the flow of finance to small business. In that vein, I was pleased to spend some time with a company called Prospa in Sydney recently. They are doing a great deal to assist small business with unsecured loans, which helps businesses grow. I appreciate the time that the colleagues at Prospa spent with me a couple of weeks ago in Sydney.

A third issue for us to respond to in the future is the incredible drop in apprentices that has occurred over the last two years of this government. Between September 2013 and March this year, Australian apprentice and trainee numbers dropped from around 418,000 to 320,000. That is almost 100,000 apprentices lose in two years. We need to start investing in our workforce of the future before it is too late. That is especially true when it comes to the STEM workforce—science, technology, engineering and maths. It is another priority of this side of the House that has unfortunately been left languishing by that side.

These are just a few areas that we will need to work on to strengthen our small business sector into the future. If we are serious about having a country that is powered by enterprise, ambition and aspiration, we need to make sure that we have the ecosystem right and the conditions right for small businesses to prosper. At the end of the day, that is the best chance that we have as a community and as a country to create the sorts of jobs that we will need for the generations that follow us.

So there is a lot more that the government can do to support small businesses in my community and right around Australia. We will continue to work with all small businesses—at the peak level, with great organisations like COSBOA, and locally with each individual business to ensure that we help strengthen Australia's major source of employment, ideas and growth.

John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy, employing millions of people across the country and producing more than $330 billion for our nation's economy. But they are more important than that. Small businesses are at the heart of our local community, creating spaces and villages that we cluster around and associate ourselves with. Small businesses are our community's soul, and I am immensely proud of the efforts this government has made to support them and help them to grow.

My electorate of Bennelong has over 14,500 small businesses spread across it between roughly 20 shopping villages. This accounts for 44 per cent of local employment. To help them out, I have started my own shop local campaign called Bennelong Village Businesses, which promotes them in their local communities and reminds local shoppers of the immense benefits there are to shopping locally. Chain stores and shopping malls may offer size but they fall short on almost every other front. Small businesses, on the other hand, (1) keep the dollars in the local economy; (2) deliver product diversity relevant to their local community; (3) are usually walking distance from your house; (4) support local jobs; (5) increase the value of your home; (6) maintain a local character and identity; (7) promote stronger communities; (8) drive efficiency and innovation for customers; (9) provide a safe and secure local environment; and (10) provide a responsive and accountable face for business.

This final point is certainly not as quantifiable as revenue or employment figures, but within it lies the strongest benefit to shopping locally. Unlike big multinational companies, small business has a heart, a face, and remembers your coffee order. No-one visits their 'friendly chain supermarket' but you do know your friendly local butchers, your neighbourhood grocers and your mate, the newsagent—who is still promising me a winning Lotto ticket!

Local shopping villages are the heart of our communities. The Bennelong Village Business campaign works by highlighting a shopping village each month and celebrating it in the local media. Additionally, I visit each local shop in the village strip and collect marketing materials which I then distribute to the local area. This gives every shop free advertisements to 2,000 homes in the area, with the aim to increase footfall and have more people recognise the huge benefits there are in shopping locally. Shortly I will be expanding this campaign to get businesses to talk to each other and to work together. The idea is to improve their buying power and use their unique features to fight against the power of the larger stores. If small businesses can add competitive prices to the list of benefits I have already named, they will be unstoppable.

Small businesses have already had a huge helping hand from this year's well-received budget, from the $20,000 tax deduction to the 1.5 per cent cut in the company tax rate. These benefits amount to a $5.5 billion small business package, which is already having an enormous effect on hundreds of local businesses across Bennelong. These reforms make a difference to individuals—individuals like Tony Fedele of Fedele's Pizza in East Ryde. In a forthright discussion with me the other day he agreed that, while the economy is doing it tough and there is always more to be done, this government is looking in the right areas and fixing the bits that are broken. The small business measures are a case in point. Tony used the deductible $20,000 to upgrade and streamline his payment system—something he has wanted to do for a while, but was able to do so with the help of this money. While his pizzas remain as delicious as ever—and he tells me they are non-fattening—his business is running smoother and will continue to serve his local community, to the benefit of everyone involved.

Small business does not mean small intentions, though. One local company, OmniPos, started from humble beginnings in West Ryde and are now looking to take on the world. They have developed their own product, an innovative new payment and stock management system, grown it with the help of the small business package and are now looking to sell it internationally with the help of the slew of recent free trade agreements negotiated for this very purpose by this government. This is the potential that can be unlocked in our small businesses. The future is very exciting. From little things, big things grow. (Time expired)

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin my comments today on the motion on small business, going to point 2 of the motion which acknowledges the work, it says, of the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Small Business in putting together a package that will deliver for small business now and into the future. We must stop to ask which Prime Minister, which Treasurer and which Minister for Small Business the motion addresses. It obviously celebrates what this government has put in place for small business. Of course, we on this side agree that with 96 per cent of all Australian businesses being small businesses, it does warrant serious support. But, in opposition, those opposite opposed a tax cut for small business. They abolished the asset write-off and wound back the lost carry-back measures introduced by the former Labor government. After the unfair, cruel, 2014 budget, when they realised the polls were headed south, they suddenly found that they could support those measures of an asset write-off scheme—limited in time, not permanent as it would have been under Labor—and introduced a tax cut of 1.5 per cent.

I bring the chamber's attention to the 2015 budget reply speech by the Leader of the Opposition, who said:

A 1.5 per cent cut for small businesses might be enough to generate a headline but it is not enough to generate the long-term confidence and growth our economy needs.

He went on to say:

… let's give small businesses the sustainable boost to confidence that they deserve, the confidence to create jobs … That is the future. That is confidence.

I would argue and suggest that our new Prime Minister, our new Treasurer and our new Minister for Small Business get serious about these issues. I say this in all seriousness because in Lalor I hear specific things from small business. One of the things I have heard the loudest and the longest is what they are not getting from this government and this Prime Minister—from the new Prime Minister, the member for Wentworth, who was the Minister for Communications. The one thing that small businesses want to talk to me about in the electorate of Lalor is a world-class broadband. What they want to talk to me about is that they are very disappointed with this second-rate NBN, and they are more than disappointed about the digital divide that is being created in my electorate, not just from house to house and resident to resident but from business to business. This digital divide is impacting negatively on small business in Lalor.

Google recently outlined the impact of reliable internet provision for small business. In an electorate with over 9,000 small businesses, I know that the people of Lalor know how important that is. Small business in Lalor accounts for a third of our economic output, but they are being held back by the poor provision of the internet because in Lalor many addresses are not getting any internet except for very expensive wireless internet. This is a cruncher, a killer, for small business. We know and we have heard from members today about the small margins that small business may be relying on. I did a survey recently and one of the small businesses in Lalor responded to that survey—many responded but this one, I thought, was quite pertinent for today's debate. This person said:

I live four kilometres from the Werribee exchange and run a home-based business. The internet speeds are pathetic, making it difficult for me to maintain online backups of my work and send work to clients over the internet.

This is limiting small business in Lalor, so I have a message for the new Prime Minister: if you want to assist small business, work with us to enact the five per cent cut to company tax for small business that we suggested, and get serious about a first-class NBN rollout; get serious to ensure that small business is not being crunched by a lack of access to 21st century technology; get serious about making small business the driver of economic activity; get serious about supporting them to create the jobs of the future; get serious about supporting small business in my electorate, so that they can create jobs and employ those people in my electorate who are currently unemployed. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.