Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senators always use the adjournment debate to speak on a range of serious issues, and I want to bring up an issue—that is, Australia’s two-speed economy—that I think is probably one of the most serious facing us, particularly with Christmas approaching. It has become something of a commonplace to suggest that if your job or your company profits rely on the mining industry, you are doing well. But if you are not in the mining industry—if you are in retail, manufacturing or one of hundreds of other areas, including tourism—you are not doing well at all.

I have been most interested to read some of the conflicting views on this that have come out of the government and some of the government’s advisers. The Minister for Small Business, Senator Sherry, said on 24 October that there was little the government could do to make borrowing easier for Australia’s two million small business owners, but he did acknowledge that things are ‘much tougher now for small business’. The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Mr Stevens, made the extraordinary suggestion that the two-speed economy is some sort of fallacy. Governor Stevens may well be an expert in the area of interest rate setting and monetary policy, but he is certainly not an expert on what is happening in the real world of the main streets and the shopping strips all over Australia.

I was interested to hear Senator Sherry today saying that the government had invested a whole $2 million to $3 million in reducing regulation for small businesses. That is the most minor of starts—a very minute start—and it would not wash at all well if the minister and others were to go to places like Goondiwindi, where one store which has been operating for just over 100 years will be closing its doors this month, not because the family want to close it but simply because they do not have enough customers anymore.

That sort of situation is replicated everywhere you go throughout Queensland. The situation is the same in Dalby. In Cairns, the slowdown in the tourism business and the building sector is feeding through to every small- and medium-sized business in the town—it is a disaster. I was talking at the weekend to a very experienced businesswoman from Townsville. She has run a retail outlet there for more than 20 years, always successfully and always very carefully watching how well the business is going. She said to me, ‘I think Townsville might be in depression.’ This is not a woman who lightly resorts to complaints of the ‘we’ll all be rooned’ kind; she is a sensible woman who checks very carefully. Yet she tells me she is finding that, whilst there is still spending at the top of the market and at the bottom of the range of goods she sells, there is no spending going on in the middle. The question we have to ask is: why isn’t spending occurring at this level? Why are these businesses being affected like this?

Another business, in Samford in Brisbane, which operates on weekends, has just cut back its weekend trading hours by more than one-half. Goodness, why has it had to do this? It has something to do with penalty rates and with the fact that its staff have to work shifts of a minimum of three hours. In the current climate the expenditure that is a matter of choice rather than necessity for people, such as putting a dog into a boarding kennel—as with the business I am discussing—is more limited, so this business cannot afford to stay open for the same hours it did two years ago. It is all very well for the government to say that perhaps on the one hand there is a two-speed economy but on the other hand there is not—just pull your socks up and get on with it—but that is not the experience in Australia, and Queensland in particular, and it is getting more serious as Christmas approaches.

One factor in particular that is really affecting business is the downturn in the housing industry. This is becoming so serious now that it is causing huge problems for all the downstream industries that rely on the building industry for their work and their profits. It is not uncommon now to find builders, plumbers and others—tradespeople—who have had to put off staff simply because the work is not there. If you live in a mining community you may be having a lot of trouble getting a tradesman to come to an ordinary domestic job because they are all working for the mines, but that is not the reality in the rest of Australia.

What does the federal government suggest can be done? It has done a little to reduce regulation. That is wonderful, but small- and medium-sized enterprises are the lifeblood of Australia’s recovering economy, if it is to recover, and we need to do more to encourage it. There is this fallacy all over the place about how easy it is to have a business and how easy it is to get a loan to run or sell a business. This is not the reality. In Queensland, my home state, manufacturing, construction, retail trade and tourism are all down. In the last two years the construction industry in Queensland has lost 24,000 jobs. We had the big falderal—the big hurrah—of the Building the Education Revolution. Of course, rather than to small and medium business people, that work is going only to the very large companies, which manage to charge significant management fees for doing it. Small and medium enterprises, the heart and life of Australia, are being squeezed over and over again.

A key issue was raised by Peter Anderson from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He feels that business is underrepresented in this place. He says:

Of the 220 federal members and senators, at least 170 had no active business background in the period prior to entering the parliament.

That is more than three-quarters. I have not done any analysis, but I do not need to; I know that, on the coalition side in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is a strong knowledge and strong understanding of small business and its needs. It is on the government side that there is no understanding. This, I think, is borne out by the sorts of policies that they have in place at the moment. The cry from industry at all levels is: ‘There is more you can be doing. The cash splash was fine, but don’t think you’ve fixed it—you haven’t.’

Katie Lahey, the Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia, recently said:

We are continuing to see proposals to amend key business laws, often as a hasty reaction to individual issues, where there is little or no evidence of the kind of market failure that warrants government intervention.

According to Ms Lahey, the immediate response to any perceived problem with an individual business or in an industry sector is to ‘rush headlong into amending pieces of legislation’. This, of course, is the work of people who do not understand business and how to implement reform. I think we only have to look at some of their work in the home insulation field and the Building the Education Revolution program to realise how appallingly the government go about it. The other point is that their regulation is all merely reactive; there is no proactive regulation. There is no plan to develop processes that would respond to a model incorporating prospective and retrospective reforms so that bad regulation is not made in the first place. (Time expired)