David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Over the last couple of years we've seen small businesses ignored when it comes to legislative agenda. We've seen things like the instant asset write-off and the energy incentive legislated weeks before they expired. How is that an incentive? Sometimes we are legislating things after the fact. How are these not permanent measures to allow small businesses to actually plan? I think for the last seven budgets they've been announced. The coalition did it too—they announced new spending for small businesses. This new package which you've had for the last five or six years—just make it permanent. Allow small businesses to have certainty.

Another extraordinary failure—and I spoke about this yesterday—of both of the major parties is their failure to act on security of payments. These are small businesses and subcontractors across the country who are getting dudded. They are not being paid for work that they have completed. They are doing jobs, builders go under and they don't get paid. We've seen the parliament move to make wage theft illegal, to do all sorts of things to protect workers, yet when it comes to tradies who run small businesses or sole contractors who are subcontracting on job sites—nothing, not even a response to the Murray review. We have a firm commitment from the Prime Minister to respond to the Murray review in this term of parliament, yet it seems like we're in the last two weeks of it and we still haven't seen it come through.

The other area that we've heard so much about from small businesses is our procurement rules. They are not working for small businesses, yet we haven't seen any major changes to these procurement rules, despite everything that has come out about the failure of multinational firms who suck up contracts, often just skimming off the cream and then subcontracting to Australian businesses who should be able to get these contracts in the first place. Again, I've heard from so many Australian businesses who, when it comes to big procurement construction work from the Commonwealth government, will put in their bid with the builder. The builder will go to the Commonwealth government and say, 'These are all the subcontractors we're using and this is the price we can do it for.' The government then awards that contract, and the builder goes back out to all the subbies and says, 'If you want this job, give me your best price.' They've already worked out what it's going to cost them. Now the subbies are fighting amongst themselves, having to undercut each other, leading to more profit for the builder, while the subbies are at times are losing money to do jobs. We've got to do better than this for small businesses.

The other part of this urgency is rushing through huge bills without any parliamentary scrutiny. I think the Senate recognises that at times guillotines are used to deal with bills that have been sitting in the Senate for a long time and have been through a Senate committee process, and people are largely settled on the way they will vote. We've seen that happen. It's a very different thing we are seeing with electoral reform. JSCEM recommends broad strokes, but the government then drops 400 pages of legislation and wants it passed in eight sitting days. It's extraordinary. I think it's a real abuse of parliamentary process to not even have a Senate committee scrutinise that amount of legislation.

One of the other issues we've seen not dealt with is whistleblower protections. After almost a full term of government, we have heard lots of promises from the A-G about better protecting whistleblowers, acknowledging that the PID Act is often useless for whistleblowers. At the same time, he continues to prosecute Richard Boyle. It's time to drop that prosecution because that is also undermining trust not just in government but in institutions in this country.