Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on behalf of the opposition in a somewhat truncated debate in support of the Competition and Consumer Amendment Bill 2013. The coalition are pleased to support this bill. We are always keen to support legislation that eases the regulatory burden on small business. We believe that in this case the government are a little late coming to the party, but they have at least turned up, finally. They are not bearing a gift that is necessarily remarkable, but they have brought something that is of some value to the small business community. What they have presented is this legislation and, while I have said that it is a bit late, we believe it is a positive piece of legislation as it cuts the regulatory burden for restaurant and cafe owners in the hospitality industry without adversely affecting the customer's right to pricing integrity and information.

We should all make sure in this place that we do all we can to support the small business community, and there are many reasons for this. Families run small businesses and small business people are often leaders in our communities. When you walk around our towns, cities and suburbs, and when you look around the suburban football ground, or around the local netball fields or soccer fields, you do not see names, necessarily, of larger companies. What you often see are the names of the local newsagent, the local panel beater or the local pharmacy. These small businesses are not just the economic driver for our community; they are so often the glue that makes our communities the places we want to live, bring up a family and share times with friends and family.

Often the leaders of our local community organisations or also small business people. Again, they can be the local pharmacist who runs the CFA, the local newsagent or the local parent, who might be a mechanic, who runs the school P&C and supports the local football club, or is the coach for the school footy or netball team. These are the things that are not always taken into account by economic statistics, but they are so important to the communities that we live in. When I say that small business people are the glue of our communities, I do not mean to disregard those who might work for other companies. I have worked for one of the world's largest companies.

One of the benefits and privileges of a parliamentary role is the ability to see so many different parts of Australia. Whether I am travelling around my home state of Victoria, through my home city of Melbourne, or through regional Australia and other states, I see that the role small business people play is very important to every community that I visit. It is important in the good times when things are going well, when local footy clubs and netball teams are winning flags, and it is also particularly important in the tough times. Australia has seen too many tough times with natural disasters in the last few years. In my home state of Victoria we had the tragedy of the Black Saturday bushfires and in Queensland we had the tragedy of the great floods. In both cases, when you looked at the local SES, you saw that it was the people that ran or worked in small businesses who were often the first to put up their hands to do something.

This bill particularly impacts the 38,000 restaurants and cafes in Australia that generate about $29 billion per year in turnover. That is not an insignificant amount. Restaurants and cafes have another critical role, often, in providing first jobs for people. How many people got their first job as a waiter or washing dishes? Whether you were a uni student or still at high school you might have got a job at a local cafe, restaurant, reception centre or something like that. The hospitality sector is so important for that entry point into the labour market. Sometimes, in the grand scheme of things in this place and with all the policy apparatus that politicians and government have at their fingertips, we often forget really basic and important points. Someone's first job is not usually their last, and the point at which someone enters the labour market is not always where they stay as they usually climb up the ladder fairly quickly, but you have to provide those entry points. That is also true for re-entry points for those who may have been unemployed for a period of time.

The hospitality sector is relatively unique in that it is overwhelmingly a small-business sector. These are businesses, often not even companies, that do not have different departments. Their legal, compliance, advertising and human resources departments are on various parts of the kitchen table at home on various nights of the week. They are mum-and-dad businesses, who put up their own capital and often risk their own home. They wear multiple hats and they do everything for the business. They might be the person who acts as the cook, or the person who acts as the cleaner, and they are often the person who does both. They go to the markets to buy supplies, they meet with the accountant, they do the tax form, they fill out the BAS and they have to take care of employing people. As I said, it is these local businesses that support our local sporting clubs and community organisations.

This bill addresses an issue that I will turn to in a minute, but it specifically addresses a burden of the law that is substantial in this sector of the small business community—the hospitality sector. That is why the coalition support this particular legislation. For the context of the problem that this legislation deals with we have to go back to 2009 to understand the purpose of this bill. In 2009 a detailed provision was added to what used to be called the Trade Practices Act and is now the Competition and Consumer Act—but I will probably make the mistake of calling it the Trade Practices Act again, as many do. The 2009 change added a so-called component pricing provision which introduced a requirement for restaurants and cafes to detail any additional surcharges into the actual prices listed on menus. This ensured that costs linked to weekends, after hours or public holidays, usually labour rates and penalty rates, were made clear to customers. To some it seemed reasonable at the time. The problem, however, was again with this government's implementation of this regulation. A cafe was not allowed to put an asterisk or a statement at the bottom of a menu that indicated a surcharge for an extra cost, for example, on a weekend or on public holidays. Restaurants were not regarded as compliant if they had explanations of additional costs on the menus. The requirements were so detailed that, in order to comply, restaurants and cafes had to design, produce, print and maintain additional menus that outlined all the extra surcharge costs that were included in their pricing arrangements. To comply with this, not only would the menus have to be replaced—if it were, for example, a Sunday surcharge—but, if there were a blackboard upon which someone wrote the specials, it would have to have a sheet hung over it or it would have to be rewritten every day that there was going to be a surcharge.

There was, not surprisingly, much debate and furore over this new regulation and its implementation. The restaurant and cafe owners, often families who run small businesses around the country, were already dealing with supply chain issues, staffing rosters, changes to workplace relations, tax, accounts and cash flow at the same time as trying to increase job opportunities and grow their businesses. This new impost that required them to print and maintain multiple menus, in some cases for businesses that were already levying a surcharge, was just a step too far.

The costs, while they might sound insignificant, were actually not. The Restaurant and Catering Industry Association of Australia estimated they averaged between $8,000 and $10,000 for each restaurant. That is, $8,000 or $10,000 straight off the bottom line that a restaurant has to spend to comply with this new rule if they already applied a public holiday or weekend surcharge or, in fact, if they wished to. Anyone who knows this sector knows that it operates on very slim margins. When we look at the cost pressures that this sector has faced due to the changes—in many cases, due to this government; for example, the carbon tax forcing up energy costs, which is a significant input for restaurants and catering small businesses—we can see that this is not a trivial amount of money.

In 2010, the Productivity Commission's Annual review of regulatory burdens on business: business and consumer services recommended that the government amend what was then the Trade Practices Act to have restaurant and cafe menu surcharges for specific days placed outside the scope of the pricing provisions of the legislation. This would mean that cafes and restaurants would no longer be required to detail surcharges for specific days in the same way—with a separate menu, by rubbing out the specials board or by hanging a sheet over it on the day they had a surcharge. The Productivity Commission's Annual review of regulatory burdens on business 2010 recommended:

The Australian Government should amend the Trade Practices Act 1974 to have restaurant and café menu surcharges for specific days placed outside the scope of the component pricing provision of that legislation.

The Competition and Consumer Amendment Bill 2013 directly addresses the issue. It puts into law this Productivity Commission recommendation. It recommends the now Competition and Consumer Act 2010 has a regulation-making power inserted to enable the government to make regulations to exempt certain representations from the component pricing requirement in Australian consumer law. This exemption will ensure restaurants and cafes no longer need to provide a separate menu for days when they apply a surcharge. However, I will note that we do not yet have the specifics regarding the requirements that restaurants, cafes and the catering industry will need to fulfil. The government has said that this will come in the future with regulation. Again, the parliament is being asked to take this government at trust. We support the legislation. We have learnt to not necessarily trust the government's implementation of it.

With those concerns noted, this bill has been well received by all in the industry sector who have been affected. Industry groups such as the Australian Hotels Association, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland, Clubs Australia and the National Tourism Alliance have all endorsed this piece of legislation. We will, to this extent, trust that a good balance for consumers and a good balance for business will be reached when the government promulgates the regulation to put this into effect. We hope that the government will learn this lesson and provide a solution that carefully weighs up consumer interests with the costs of doing business.

At this point, the bill amends the relatively recently passed Competition and Consumer Act. This raises a number of issues that the opposition has highlighted. We believe strongly that competition law has an important role to play in achieving positive outcomes for consumers and businesses. Competition is the essence of our market system. Competition is the essence to a productive and efficient economy. In fact, over the last 30 to 40 years, this country has implemented a form of competition policy that, I would suggest with respect—more than anything the government claims credit for—protected Australia from the global economic recession by ensuring our economy was more responsive and more efficient. However, it has been more than 20 years since Professor Hilmer undertook his landmark work that examined our competition framework and recommended a range of legislative and policy reforms that underpin today's competition laws, procedures and philosophy. Much has happened in the Australian economy since the Hilmer review.

I will give a few examples that will be familiar to most in the community. There has been a significant consolidation in our financial sector. What were once four banks, two insurance houses, plus a great number of regional and state banks is now effectively a four-bank, four-pillar system. In the supermarket and food retailing industry, we have seen quite significant growth of the two major supermarket chains, Woolworths and Coles. We have also seen consolidation with the loss of a player like Franklins and, since the days when I was pushing trolleys around an independent supermarket in Essendon, we have seen the consolidation of a number of state based independent wholesalers into Metcash. Only in the last few years we have seen the entry of more globally based competition, such as through Aldi, which in only a few short years has managed to open about 300 stores, I understand.

It is important to note that there have been swings and roundabouts in these two developments. In some cases, consumers have demonstrably benefited and in other cases a case can be put that the competition benefits have not flown strongly through to the consumer, at least in an immediately obvious way. Some markets—and I will use an example here: the pricing of credit cards—are stickier. By 'stickier' I mean that you do not often see significant price changes. People do not tend to move products that often. Health insurance is another example, as are markets such as credit cards, where competition is defined by things other than price. In that case, you will have the interest rate, the price of money, and the competition might be defined by things like interest-free days, Frequent Flyer points or the lack of surcharges at certain places. So, while there is competition, the transparency of it is not as immediately obvious to the consumer.

There are areas in supermarkets where there has been a demonstrable benefit to consumers. Food price deflation over the last couple of years has, unarguably, left consumers better off, because greater competition in the market between the two major chains has led to food price deflation.

However, we do also know that there have been significant changes in the way larger corporations operate. So we have the issue of land development. We have had the issue of how to move customers of one particular channel into another channel. The classic case is supermarkets using discounts from supermarket cash registers to drive people to buy petrol. But effectively the aim is to drive people through the supermarket cash registers.

The coalition is well aware of the difficulties smaller retailers face competing against larger businesses in the retail market and how smaller businesses do not necessarily have meaningful access to all the legal rights that the Competition and Consumer Act might on paper grant them. The coalition, as part of its commitment to a root-and-branch review of competition law, wants such a review to look at the changes in the economy since the Hilmer review and to look at how the eternal values of competition need to respond to changing market circumstances.

I will give the most extreme example. Twenty years ago the internet was something that a few people at Melbourne uni probably logged onto to look at a black screen where they could punch a few keys a minute. The internet was not a meaningful presence in people's lives 15 years ago. In many ways it was not that meaningful in commerce even a decade ago. But it is clearly now becoming a much more important competitive aspect, including, I might add, in areas where people did not expect it, like supermarkets. I know people who now order things online. They do not walk into a supermarket but, at seven o'clock on a Thursday night, boxes turn up at their home.

Another important aspect of this that the opposition highlighted is the issue of unfair contracts. Consumers have access to unfair contract provisions under the Competition and Consumer Act. The opposition made a commitment at the last election—and we will make that commitment again—to enabling small business access to unfair contract provisions when they are dealing with big businesses. The reason this is so important is that a law is not a very good law if it is not enforceable. The opportunity for a mum-and-dad partnership that might run a cafe or a small retail store to take meaningful legal action against a larger player is, in reality, very limited. I know that a standard significant case that might be brought under the Competition and Consumer Act on abuse of market power or unconscionable conduct can cost in the millions. That is not a meaningful way for smaller businesses to access the competition law and the protections which they are currently legally entitled to. So the opposition believes that unfair contract provisions give small business that meaningful access to the law that underpins and protects competition in Australian markets.

The associated issue of compliance with competition law is something to consider as well. If it is costing millions and millions of dollars to take court action, is there something about the law that means it is too complex? This is a new area of law. It is not centuries-old property law or contract law. It is an evolving area of law. But we cannot sit by while millions and millions of dollars are spent on legal costs, ensuring that smaller businesses cannot access the provisions in the act that are meant to protect them.

So our root-and-branch review will focus on all these aspects of competition law in order to ensure that it meets the goals that were set in 1990 when Professor Hilmer published his report and which underpinned those reforms but was conscious of the fact that the world has changed. We have the internet, we have privatised utilities in many states, we have larger financial institutions and we have larger retail institutions. We need to make sure that the law responds to that changed environment, just as it did in 1990.

I will cease my comments there. The coalition supports the bill. We hope that the government takes note of its previous errors when it promulgates this regulation. We hope it does it quickly in order to give small businesses this flexibility they do not currently have and to respond to the rising costs in some cases that this government has imposed on them and make their businesses more viable, but we will be supporting the bill.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Ryan for finishing early. I want to say quite a number of things about this piece of legislation. I am aware that there are many others who would like to debate this particular bill but unfortunately, because of the guillotine imposed by the Labor Party, with the support of their political allies the Greens, we are constrained to a very short period of time to debate this important bill.

In relation to the Competition and Consumer Amendment Bill, I say: one down, 19,899 to go. Madam Deputy President, you will recall that the Labor Party promised some time ago that for every new regulation they introduced they would repeal one. We know that since the Labor Party have been in power they have introduced some 21,000 new or amended regulations. I will just repeat that: since the Labor Party have been in power, they have introduced 21,000 new or amended regulations which small business and business generally have to comply with. No wonder the cost of doing business has gone up so much in Australia. No wonder Australian manufacturing businesses are closing down daily and exporting the manufacturing jobs that used to be in Australia to China, India and other places. It is all because the Labor Party continue to impose costs like the carbon tax and the mining tax on small business. They have imposed on small business, as I said, 21,000 new or amended regulations since they have been in power.

Perhaps I will digress here. Why would anyone, particularly me, believe any promise the Labor Party made after the most famous misstatement of all time—'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' Perhaps that statement has turned out to be true, because Ms Gillard is no longer leading a government that clearly has introduced the carbon tax. It will be interesting to see what Mr Rudd does in relation to the commitment never to introduce a carbon tax that was made by the Australian Labor Party before the last election.

But I digress. Getting back to their promise that for every regulation they introduced they would repeal one, I might say that they have not repealed 21,000, although to their credit they have repealed 1,100. That is why I say of this piece of legislation, 'One down and a mere 19,899 to go,' if the Labor Party are to discharge the promise they made to repeal one regulation for every one they introduced. Having said that, I congratulate the Gillard government for reducing at least one piece of regulation with this bill.

As my colleague Senator Ryan has very clearly explained, this is a regulation about pricing in restaurants and cafes. It has taken over 12 months of consultation to get to this day. Three state governments have had to agree. It has been through a tortuous path just to get here. And you wonder why Australia is going down the gurgler. You wonder why Australian jobs are going overseas. It is because the Gillard, and before that the Rudd, Labor government just imposed taxes, costs and regulation on business, so that it is no longer possible for Australians to have a manufacturing industry or, indeed, many industries at all.

This process, which we hope will be finished today, will at least address the issue of the way in which you can advertise the weekend surcharge on a restaurant menu or on a board outside a restaurant or cafe. I am sure that those listening to this debate will not believe that we have had to go through this tortuous process just do that. But that is what happens when you have Labor governments. They are interested only in telling everybody how they should act. They do not believe that people are capable of making their own decisions. Labor governments always think that they know better; Big Brother in Canberra knows better than individuals. They will tell you what you can do with your life and your business.

This regulation is simply another impost on small business. The Liberal Party and the National Party are the parties of small business. Why? Because we recognise that they are the engine room of our economy. We also recognise that it is business—small business, medium business—that creates jobs in Australia. It is not governments that create jobs, unless they create artificial jobs in the bureaucracy—and heaven knows that they have done that. I forget the actual figure, but I think that since the Labor Party have been in power we have employed—what is it?—22,000 additional public servants. I take it back—

Lin Thorp (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have created 900,000 new jobs.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government has created 900,000 new jobs? I do not know that there are 900,000 new public servants, because those are the only jobs that governments can actually create. Small business and medium-sized business and big business are the ones that create jobs. The jobs that the government creates are the 22,000 additional public servants, most of them in this lovely city. Those are the jobs the Labor government have created. We in the coalition understand that real job creation comes from small and medium-sized business. That is why you cannot keep creating real jobs, as opposed to Public Service jobs, while you keep imposing costs and regulations on small business.

I repeat: good luck to the Gillard government for removing one regulation. I am not sure when the next election is going to be these days. Ms Gillard said it was going to be on 14 September. There is press speculation and a lot of rumours around members of the Labor Party that it is now not going to be on that date, but of course the parliament has not been brought into those discussions. Those of us who, in our democracy, are supposed to be running the country will of course, as is usual with the Labor Party, be the last to know. If the election is to be held on 14 September, and if the Labor Party are to discharge the promise they made about repealing 21,000 pieces of regulation in their term, they have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks. We know of course that that will not happen.

The regulation being removed, as my colleague has said, enables regulations to be made to exempt certain representations from component-pricing requirements in the Australian Consumer Law. The amendment will allow regulations to be made to place restaurant and cafe menu surcharges for specific days outside the component-pricing requirements, which put simply means that you can have a different menu or a different pricing explanation on different days. That seems very sensible.

It is brought about because there are substantial penalties for those who work on weekends and at odd hours, and that is appropriate in many cases. It does not, of course, take into account that many people, particularly university students who study during the week, often want to get their jobs on the weekend. They look forward to employment on the weekend, because that is when they can earn a bit of cash to pay for whatever they need money for. Regrettably, with the legislation and regulations that have been around over many years, the numbers of jobs available on weekends is simply not what it used to be. So all of those jobs that used to be available for university students, and others who find that working on the weekend really suits them, are no longer as plentiful as they used to be.

Madam Acting Deputy President Stephens, you and I and many others have been to many seaside towns and tourist resorts where, when you walk along the main street on a Sunday, every second cafe is shut. Why? Because the small-business owners can simply not afford the staff to open them up. I was in Hervey Bay the other day with Keith Pitt, the excellent LNP candidate for Hinkler who will replace the long-serving Paul Neville—those are big shoes for Keith Pitt to fill, but I am sure he will do it—and we were talking to small-business men along the esplanade in Hervey Bay, and every second shop was shut down on the weekend, simply because they could not afford to open up on those days. So those jobs that used to be available to people who wanted to work on weekends in Hervey Bay are no longer available. That, I regret to say, is probably one of the reasons why there is unemployment in the Hervey Bay area. There should not be. Hervey Bay is a great place. It is the whale-watching capital of the world, with a great climate and great activities, and near Fraser Island; it is a magnificent place for people to go. But small business there, as it is everywhere in Australia, is struggling because of the regulation and cost of the things introduced by, first of all, the Rudd Labor government in 2007 and, more recently, the Gillard government.

Talking about competition and consumer affairs reminds me that small businesses are also very concerned with the duopoly of Coles and Woolworths. Coles and Woolworths obviously conduct legitimate businesses, and customers like using them. But they have an inordinate market power which producers, suppliers and wholesalers will tell you is not always appropriately used. That is why I am delighted that the coalition, as one of its core promises in the upcoming election campaign, is to conduct that root-and-branch review of the competition laws in Australia, to see what can be done to make it fairer for producers, farmers and small businesses to compete with Coles and Woolworths.

We now have a government led by Mr Rudd who will, no doubt, continue to promise to look after small business and reduce regulations. We all know, and Australians know, that Mr Rudd can be believed no more than Ms Gillard could be. We all remember Mr Rudd promising to end the blame game on health and hospitals, but what have we heard, consistently, on health and education and anything else that goes wrong under this dysfunctional government? It is all the fault of the states—they are the ones who do all the things for which the poor old Gillard and Rudd governments have been blamed! Well, everybody knows that that is a joke. Mr Rudd will continue to blame everybody else for his own failures as Prime Minister and then as a minister in Ms Gillard's government.

We know Mr Rudd well from Queensland. We remember when he, as a public servant, ran the Premier's office in Queensland. And you talk about dysfunctional governments there; you talk about how staff were always leaving the Department of the Premier and Cabinet in Queensland. It was because of the way Mr Rudd ran that office when he was in Queensland. It is easy to understand why one of Mr Rudd's colleagues, Mr Steve Gibbons, said, 'He is a psychopath with a giant ego.' It is very easy to understand that. It is very easy to understand why former minister Mr Craig Emerson, another Queenslander, who has known Mr Rudd not only in this parliament but when he was wielding the power in Queensland as the chief public servant in the Premier's office, said of Mr Rudd:

There has been attack on the Prime Minister—

that is, Gillard—

going back to the last election. There was destabilisation and leaking then; it's been going on since. … So if we're talking about attacking sitting prime ministers and destabilisation, I think Kevin—

and I think he meant Kevin Rudd—

should look in his own backyard because this has been going on for too long …

You will be aware, Madam Acting Deputy President Stephens, perhaps better than I, of how people who have worked with Mr Rudd have always been very critical of any promises he has made, of the way he runs his office and the way he has run his government. That is not my criticism, I hasten to add; it is criticism by people who have worked with Mr Rudd in his cabinet, next door to him, and continue doing so. So promises that Mr Rudd might make, like this promise to abolish one regulation for every new one created, the Australian people will no longer believe. It is time that this country got a government it can believe and trust. I look forward to the next election, whenever it is, so that Australia can get a decent, honest government again. But praise where praise is due—one regulation is gone with this bill. I support this bill, but there are 19,899 regulations to be abolished in the next few weeks. I will believe that when I see it.

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As this is one of the last bills that I will see in the Senate, it is very important that I speak on it. One of the reasons I came to this chamber was to support small business, and the issues I spoke about in my maiden speech are in a minor way addressed in this bill. This is a generic amendment. It is a statement of the bleeding obvious—that we cannot have small restaurants having to produce two menus. It is excessive bureaucracy. We have to get out of the way of small business. A restaurant on the High Street should not have excessive costs put on them. We have to make sure we create flexibility for people in the restaurant industry.

We have to realise that the restaurant industry is a great employer of people. As has been alluded to by Senator Ryan—he might not have thought I was listening to him, but I was listening to him diligently from my office whilst lying on my couch—there are around 38,000 restaurants in Australia and they generate around $29 billion a year. Many restaurants are family businesses, and they are the epitome of what I believe in in small business. This allows families to grow up knowing their children. To me and many in the National Party, it is a social statement—the capacity to live and grow with your children. I suppose we are influenced by how we grew up. I grew up on a farm. I saw my mother and father all the time because the business we worked in was where we lived. This is something that should be available to many people.

Restaurants are a feature of small business. How often do you go into a small cafe and see mum and dad and one of the sons all working together. In Chinese restaurants you see the whole family pitching in and working together and knowing each other and growing up as a tight family unit. So the ethos of small business is intertwined with the ethos of the family. It is a crucial part of the dynamic of where I have sat philosophically, and it is probably why I sit on this side of the chamber.

A key part of that also is that we must make sure that we do not create a bureaucracy that makes small business impossible. I have seen this even in areas such as the insurance industry, where small operators keep being loaded down with regulation for regulation's sake. This is generally to the benefit of large providers, who can deal with the overheads of excessive regulation whereas a small businesses cannot. The occupational health and safety officer is a classic example. Large organisations such as the one I used to work for, ConAgra, can employ an occupational health and safety officer; they have the capacity to do that by reason of the size of their operation. But smaller feedlots cannot because they do not have the volume to be able to support that.

A lot of the regulatory burden is state laws. One of the most insidious laws that came into the farming sector was the tree-clearing guidelines. It determined that an asset that was owned by an individual would overnight be divested from that individual and invested in the state. Many of my own colleagues on the conservative side of the fence started making excuses for it—'it had to be right', 'the community is right to steal an asset from an individual'. But it is not the community's right to steal an asset from an individual. Excessive regulation steals an opportunity from the individual because it creates a mechanism whereby it is virtually impossible for the individual to progress through small business.

If we are going to get out of the current circumstances we are in financially, we have to rely on the economic powerhouse of small business. We can either be forced into this position down the track or we can move into this position of our own volition by genuinely going into the area and recognising that there is always a risk-return trade-off. But at the moment we are too risk averse and the return is that we are putting unnecessary pressures on small business that will in the future impede an economy that has had the benefit in the past of a mining boom that has generated great wealth in the economy. But that boom will taper off because all commodities are cyclical. That is not some sort of Cassandra-like principle; it is a statement of the obvious. As the commodity sector peels off, you are going to have to rely on other sectors of the economy to take up the burden of supplying the return to the nation to cover our bills, to cover our debt and to cover the social services that we in here demand every day in passing legislation. That return needs to match what we lose from areas such as the manufacturing industry.

If you are going to use the argument of GDP, we must start removing regulation from small business. I hope this is a statement of firsts. I fully support the root-and-branch review of the Competition and Consumer Act. That is going to be an absolute statement of our belief in small business, our core constituency. Where we go with that is a reflection of who we are as a political force.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being almost 4.30, the time allotted for consideration of this bill has now expired. The question is that the bill be now read a second time.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.