Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like much of what the member for Reid says, there is actually very little in the motion today that I can stand to disagree with. Essentially what we have here is a series of statements of fact about how important small businesses are and how important infrastructure is to them. I think the open question for us today is the extent to which the Abbott government is living up to the high standards that the member for Reid has set for it, and I will go into some of the detail there.

But can I start by saying that of course Labor shares the belief that small businesses are the engine room of the Australian economy. All of us in this House have thousands and thousands of small businesses operating in our electorates. In my electorate of Hotham, we have more than 5,000 businesses operating, from accountants to grocery stores, online retailers to small manufacturers. These are the people who keep our local community in Hotham humming.

At a national level, we are all familiar with the statistics. We know that there are more than two million small and medium enterprises that are actively trading today. Those organisations employ more than half of the people of Australia who work today. These numbers are definitely worth celebrating. They are an indicator of the inventiveness and the creativity of Australians out there. Small business is about people in Australia, normal people, who have a great idea and have some get up and go and it is about ordinary working people owning capital. There is nothing that is more consistent with Labor's vision for the Australian economy than supporting these small businesses and helping them to be as large and as successful as they can be.

Critically, we do not just talk the talk on small business; we walk the walk. We have a very proud record specifically in this area of small business policy. I will go through some of those key reforms but I want to leave those remarks to the end, because the central thrust of the discussion that the member for Reid has instigated today is about infrastructure. I say with great respect to my good friend the member for Reid that, if he is wanting to go after Labor in a policy, then he is barking up the wrong tree by picking infrastructure. We are so proud of our record on infrastructure under the Rudd and Gill government, and we are happy to defend that record in this parliament or in any forum that the member for Reid may choose.

When we look at the plethora of policy issues on which there is a gaping chasm between the rhetoric of the Abbott government and the action of the Abbott government, it is infrastructure where we see one of the really good examples of this. Since becoming Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, has told us many times that he wants to be known as the infrastructure Prime Minister. But the simple reality is that, when Labor came to power, against every OECD country, we were ranked 20th in the per cent of our GDP that was being spent on these crucial infrastructure investments and, when Labor left office in 2013, we were ranked first out of every OECD country. In the 2010-11 budget, Labor invested $51 billion in infrastructure projects, and the crystal clear message that I want those in the gallery and those at home to take away today is that there is not one additional dollar going towards infrastructure investment that has been committed by this Abbott government.

Recently, the Prime Minister conducted this charade tour around Australia where he set about reannouncing a series of projects that Labor announced and Labor planned and Labor funded. Our guy, the member for Grayndler—who many in this country would say is the best infrastructure minister we have ever had in Australia—has called this the 'magical infrastructure reannouncement tour'. And it is not just Labor people who are pointing out this big chasm between the rhetoric and the reality. I will not go through the quotes but there is a terrific article in the Australian by Peter Van Onselen, who is of course a Liberal Party commentator. He says that really this is an area where the coalition has neglected infrastructure government after government and it has been Labor that have been the ones to invest in this important area.

What we did on infrastructure was not just about dollars; it was also about the way that we put really good, robust parameters around infrastructure investment. Under Labor, no more did these infrastructure projects get funded based on what was most politically expedient. Under Labor, it was about what fitted the policy objectives and what was going to deliver the best for the Australian economy.

Labor is not just the party for infrastructure; we are also the party of small business. Some of the highlights of the things that we did when we were in government included the fact that we were the first Australian government, I think, to bring small business into the cabinet—what an obvious move; to get that voice around the cabinet table. We brought small business onto the COAG agenda, and there were some significant changes to the tax system which saw small businesses benefit in particular. I am very proud to speak on this motion and to say that we are there for small business, we are there for infrastructure, and we are proud of that record.

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