Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

in terms of iron ore and coal, and, more latterly, gas.

I turn now to Senator Whish-Wilson. Absolutely laudable, Senator Whish-Wilson—through you, Acting Deputy President Williams. Like you, small business—fantastic! A one-and-a-half per cent tax cut; I am glad you are going to support it. What else have we done? Red tape has been reduced. I hope that you—from your background, Senator Whish-Wilson—will be very, very keen to support us when we have a reasonable discussion about what the impediments are to small business in the hospitality and tourism sectors, particularly on weekends, because, again, those are going to be the areas. We have a look at interest rates and we see the benefits. You speak of the Greens policy associated with the mining tax. I know Senator Whish-Wilson well enough to know that he himself would never, in his small business, and nor would his wife in hers, go out and spend profits or income that they thought they were going to earn. We all said the mining tax would make no money. It made no money! But what did they do? They turned around and spent it, that grossly incompetent government. Do not link yourselves to them, whatever you do.

But when it comes to small business, you and I both know well about agribusiness and the farming sectors. I am very pleased to see the crossbench senators also devoting much time and attention. I am not going to go in any detail through the figures that Senator Canavan mentioned because they are there in Hansard for everybody to read, except to say—through you, Acting Deputy President Williams—to Senator Dastyari that these are not coalition statements; they are statements by the ANZ Bank. They are statements by the Dun and Bradstreet Business Expectations Survey. They are statements, again, by Ernst & Young—independent, Senator Dastyari—and they talking about the parameters that we know to be so important.

Let's now turn to what this government is achieving. One of the great faults of the last government was the raising of sovereign risk. It was not just the loss of revenue, income and investment coming into this country; it was Australians going offshore. In my own state, 65 per cent of mining exploration went to Canada. Why? It was because of the imposition of the carbon tax and mining tax. Sovereign risk was causing money to go from this country to other countries. When we should have been investing in mining exploration here, investments were going offshore. Nothing was coming in.

Let me tell you one of the greatest benefits of the work done by Mr Andrew Robb and those fine officials in the department of trade—the three free trade agreements. Nothing was achieved in the six years of the Labor government, but here we had free trade agreements with Japan, Korea and China—

Senator Lines interjecting—