Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to give voice to the concerns of small-business owners in my home state of Victoria. Everywhere I go, the messages are the same: it is getting tougher and tougher for small-business owners to keep their doors open. At the business roundtable hosted by our candidate in Higgins, Katie Allen, local business owners told us that the spiralling costs of inventory and overheads combined with lower levels of discretionary spending are making it harder and harder for them to stay profitable.

When I joined our candidate for Isaacs, Anthony Richardson, in Dandenong recently, we visited a company called the ABEC Group, a successful local manufacturer who has been chosen to supply components for the Hunter Class frigate program—fantastic for Victoria. But like many Australian businesses, particularly small manufacturing businesses, they are being hit with skyrocketing energy costs and are caught up in obstructive government red tape.

When I met with the Springvale Asian Business Association out in Hotham, the overwhelming concern they had was their inability to get staff. A woman named Toni, who owns and operates a childcare centre, said that her centre is only running at 60 per cent capacity due to labour shortages. Small-business owners don't ask for much. They just want the opportunity to get ahead through their own determination and enterprise. But under Labor, unaffordable energy prices, endless red tape, labour shortages and labour costs are putting the pressure on. It is this government's responsibility to lift those burdens that are currently weighing down our local job creators and enable Australian entrepreneurship to once again thrive. Instead, Labor has failed Australian small businesses right at a time when they need an economic plan to specifically address the cost of doing business. This is a cost-of-doing-business crisis. The Liberal Party knows that small business is very much the backbone of our economy, and that is why we will always stand up to support small business to invest, grow, employ and drive productivity to bring prices down.