Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

In response to the final question, the five-year review period that is contained in the legislation is an outer limit. It is open to the government to conduct the review sooner. I do not think we would want to do it too soon, before we had a reasonable amount of lived experience to make an informed judgement as to whether and to what extent there ought to be further improvements to the framework that has been put in place through this legislation.

The other issue that Senator Whish-Wilson raised was about the definition of a small business. When you pursue a tax cut for small business, the assessable income levels are not necessarily a key determiner when it comes to drawing a line in the sand as to who is in and who is out. But for the purposes of this exercise of extending to small business protections that are generally available to consumers, in the context of unfair contract terms, our advice, and what has come out of the consultation process, is that the easiest way for small business to apply an appropriate test is to look at the headcount—and that is what I said in my summing-up speech. 'Businesses with less than 20 employees' has been chosen by the government for the definition as it is a commonly used headcount measure and has been found by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to provide a good proxy for a small business. The headcount approach is also considered the easiest for small business to implement. If you wanted to apply to this context any other indicator, as legitimate as it might be in the context of the tax system, you would add a further complication to the way the proposed protections in this legislation would be applied to small businesses, and that is certainly not something that the government would want to do.