Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is the passion for the small businesses in my region, who are the key players, that has distracted me from that very important standing order. I will endeavour to accede to your request little more carefully, Madam Acting Deputy President. The reality is that, on the ground, people are paying the price for decisions made by the man who is now the Prime Minister of this country. He thought it was fair enough to deliver this lemon into the regions of Australia. It was supposed to be cheaper, but $29 billion has turned into $56 billion—it has nearly doubled in price. It is way behind schedule, as is articulated very clearly in this article by Mr Mark Kenny.

In addition to that, if you decide your business is worth investing in and worth growing and you want the new technology that Mr Turnbull decided you did not need, you can pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. That is what it says on the nbn co website. Yes, for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, you can get the basic technology that you need to be a successful business in this country. That is a revelation with respect to what the Liberal government really think about small business in the regions across this country. They do not care that they are putting regional Australia behind the rest of the country. They do not care, because they are quite happy that the big end of town and their mates in the city have got the real deal; they have got the real NBN. It makes a really big difference.

In the middle of Gosford we have a real-life experiment going on. There is a hub where genuine small businesses, innovative and creative small businesses, have the real NBN. They have fibre to their house. Many of them are home businesses. They also have fibre to their premise in the main street of Gosford. There we have a company—you can look them up—called BlinkMobile. They got an international award for innovation in industry as an international business that is in the cloud. The only reason they can do that is that they have got the real NBN. They are employing 30 people—and have perhaps even grown since I was last there—on great wages on the Central Coast, in regional Australia, because they got the real NBN. They got it before Mr Turnbull became the Minister for Communications. As soon as he came in, he decided he knew better. He knew what was best for small business, and he cut it away.

The problem for our small businesses across this country is very, very real. Mr Turnbull's decision making around what Australians need and do not need is shown to be very, very flawed. He cannot run from his shameful record. Again I say: go to the article in The Sydney Morning Herald by Mark Kenny around the rollout that is faltering, the blow-out in costs and the gap-to-target that has increased from 49,000 to 65,000 as at the week ending 12 February. These issues are created by the man who acts as though and talks as though he knows what the real needs of small business are.

This piece of legislation is particularly important for small businesses that find they are growing and that need to make some sort of change to their corporate structure. If the revenue of your business is under $2 million and you want to defer any gains or losses that you might make when you are transferring business assets from one type of entity to another—perhaps you are a partnership, changing to another structure—this legislation deals with some anomalies around that. It is important because, at the moment, a small business that wants to become an incorporated company, or a company that wants to become a trust, pays a capital gains tax bill for transferring assets from one business to another structure. Without the change this legislation allows, a company is forced to stay in a structure that does not allow it to grow and, when a person transfers assets from themselves to themselves, they are forced to pay a capital gains tax—which does not seem very fair and does not really help small businesses grow. That is why this is a sensible piece of legislation. It will indeed provide the flexibility we need to allow businesses to grow and thrive. But Labor have some concerns about this legislation and we think it is important to ensure that it should work in the way that is intended. We propose that there should be a Treasury review of this in a couple of years to make sure it is working the way we want it to.

There are differences between Labor and Liberal with regard to small business. One of those important differences became evident in the very first budget of the Liberal government under Mr Abbott. Labor instituted two really important things. One was the instant asset write-off, to make sure that people who were purchasing something for their business could write that off immediately rather than have to depreciate it, which took away a lot of red tape. When this government came in, they immediately said, 'Small businesses do not need that. We will get rid of that.'

They are so disconnected from the people they purport to support that they did not even check with the Small Business Council about it. The council was outraged by it, and so there was a redress of that. Like Mr Turnbull, these Liberals know better than small business and so they come in heavy-handed, not listening to small business—they know better and so they just do things to small business without proper consultation. Small businesses, which were going to use that instant asset write-off properly, ended up getting a sugar hit of commitment from Mr Abbott, who said, 'We'll do it to two years—just the two years.' Why two years? Because this government is only about itself. It is not about giving business a plan for the future; it is about telling business what they can do and exploiting business by saying, 'We're your friends; 'we're your friends.' I remember the then minister for small business, Mr Billson, the member for Dunkley, was the one charged with telling everyone how good it was. They gave a sugar hit the two years but, when those two years are up, the businesses planning to grow have suddenly lost one of their platforms. Why two years? Because the government cynically manipulates their announcements to time them with what they thought would be their next election.

In their first budget they did a dirty deal on small business and then turned their backs and walk away again. The con-artistry around the Liberal government, which continue to act as though they were the friends of small business, is disgraceful. Day after day we see them come into this place with legislation they put through to protect their friends in multinational corporations at the cost of ordinary working Australians, who show up and pay their taxes every week. We saw a deal in the last week of this parliament between the Greens and the coalition government to make it more difficult for the Taxation Office to show Australians who is paying tax and who is not. They did not protect ordinary Australians, like you and I; they did not protect small businesses; they protected multinationals. I say to any small business person—who is driving in the year ute, working hard for their families, taking on an apprentice and paying their tax—you cannot afford to vote for this Liberal government. You cannot afford to vote for Mr Turnbull, who decided to keep his job as communication minister—the man who made millions out of communication and who should have known better. He was tasked with the job of wrecking the NBN. 'Break it' was his direction from Mr Abbott, and that is exactly what he did. If he gets the chance—if Australian small businesses allow themselves to be conned again by this government—to be re-elected and, in some sort of partnership with the Greens, the coalition will control this chamber and this parliament. They will do to Australians what they tried to do with that 2014 budget—they will try to rip away the fabric of our society.

Support for small business is a game that they play, not a policy that they deliver on. They forget something about small business when they treat it as an economic entity. The small business women and men, who employ local people in my community and across regional Australia, are also the parents of kids in schools. They are also the carers for people who need access to hospitals. Small business people contribute to our local community. When it comes to fetes and supporting local charities, small business is where we go. They are connected to ordinary Australians. Small business believes in fairness; this government does not. Small business people need to know that their children are going to school to get a great education, wherever they walk through the door. Small business people need the Gonski funding, because they need to know that their kids are going to be looked after at school. Small business people need the Gonski funding to go into schools because they want to employ young people who are literate and numerate, who can deal with innovation and who are able to study and work and do well for this country.

Small business people who get sick need one of the 26 regional cancer centres that Labor established when we were in government last, because they can run their business and get their treatment locally. The whole time that Mr Abbott was the health minister and the whole time he was Prime Minister, we did not see investment in health. Instead we saw them rip it away—$57 billion they took away from health across this country. On arrival into parliament, Mr Abbott ripped up national partnership agreements that saw responsibility shared between state and federal governments. He just walked away; he just left people right across this country—small business people, ordinary working people sick people and walked away from that responsibility. This coalition government, which has now joined in with the Greens, do not care about ordinary working people who own small businesses, who do the hard yards, who sit down and do their BAS statement on Tuesday night at 10 o'clock, who contribute to their local community, who believe that education is a right for every child and who understand that we are all connected in this together. This government is for the top end of town, not for ordinary Australians—absolutely not for ordinary Australians and certainly not for small businesses.

It is really important at this time to indicate that we as an opposition can only do so much to protect for people who are in business across this country. When we have the opportunity to review legislation and to speak with experts about it, we listen carefully. The piece of legislation, which I am speaking to today and which I do support, gives sensible and practical assistance to growing small businesses on the coast. But let people across this country make no mistake: if you are a small business or you are pay-as-you-go earner, this government is not supporting you. If they are elected, they will absolutely sweeps through a range of changes. I would not be surprised if the on-the-table off-the-table GST rise, supposedly dead and buried, comes back. What would the impact of that be on small business? Absolutely enormous. The reality is that this is a government that lacks care. Their commitment is to making only the top end of town successful, propping up their mates and looking after one another, and any of the gestures and commentary that they make in support of small business is a con job. They should not be trusted with the government of this nation. Small business should not trust them any more than any of the rest of us do, because small business understands the hard work that goes into developing and securing businesses and, while it will benefit from this change in legislation, it will get smashed on the roundabout of this government going through and taking away from every small business the opportunities that they deserve.