Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer please update the House on how the government is moving to help employers to invest and grow their businesses? How will our proposals for small business and tax cuts for individuals help grow the economy and create jobs and higher wages for hardworking Australians?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Petrie for his question. He knows and he is back in this House because he was part of a government that had a plan to drive investment in our economy, to support more growth and more jobs. Today what has passed the parliament—in the Senate, in the other place—is the government's plan to relieve the tax burden on average working Australians with average full-time ordinary earnings. As of today 500,000 income tax payers will now get the tax relief that we put forward at the last election and has now passed through this parliament.

That is the sort of leadership that is needed to ensure that we have a tax system that energises Australians who are going out there and earning an income every day. The message they have received from this government is that we understand the work they do and the challenges they face and that wherever possible we will seek to relieve their tax burden. But we also want to provide that to small businesses in particular—and businesses more generally—who employ those Australians. The member for Petrie will know, because we visited the business together, about Bowmaker Realty, a father and son realty business in North Lakes in Queensland. They employ 22 people and they have clicked over $2 million in turnover. Those opposite want to say to them and to that business—that father and son business that employs 22 Australians, six of them just in the last 12 months—'We don't want you go grow, we don't want you to expand, we don't want you to have the sort of tax relief that enables you to put your new salespeople and your people who are out there managing your rent roll to be put in a new vehicle, we don't want you to have access to the instant asset write-off.'

We want them to have that, and that is why in our budget we have put that forward. Those opposite want to stand in the way of Bowmaker Realty and 100,000 other businesses that have a turnover of between $2 million and $10 million and say, 'No tax cuts for you!' They want to say, 'No tax cuts for small businesses in this country.' So it is no wonder that the chief executive of the Combined Small Business Alliance of Western Australia Incorporated, Oliver Moon, has written to the Leader of the Opposition and said that for small business the position taken by Labor on blocking the tax cuts for small business proposed by the government is, to say the least, reprehensible and portrays a perception of Labor being anti small business.

Well, it is not a perception. It is a hard and fast fact. That is why Tim Reed, the executive of MYOB, has said

I think they (Labor) have got it wrong and it’s actually shortsighted and shows a lack of understanding. Many businesses literally can’t afford to grow over $2m of revenue because the implications around that aren’t just the reduction in the company tax rate.

It goes to issues like depreciation and access to the instant asset write-off—all the things those opposite want to deny to small business, who want to grow. (Time expired)