Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (Small Business Measures No. 1) Bill 2015 and cognate bill, emanating from the most recent budget. I want to say at the outset that this budget delivered a very good outcome for small business. We have heard so many people talk about the role of small business in the Australian economy. We know that it accounts for 96 per cent of the business economy. Everyone talks about being attached to large business et cetera, but when I say '96 per cent' I do not mean 96 per cent of the volume; I mean 96 members of the business community. We will have the Minerals Council dinner here tonight—there will be BHP, there will be Peabody, there will be a whole range of large businesses and multinationals here. And of course the large companies—the Rios et cetera—employ a lot of people, but none of them employs as many people as the small businesses in Australia today.

We have heard testimony after testimony from people here who have been involved in small business. This was a business package that brought a $5.5 billion outcome for small business. It was loosely described by some as 'a tradies budget'. In my electorate of Canning, for example, I have 10,000 small businesses. Some of those are businesses of one—as we heard one opposition speaker say, they operate from home. Some of them do not even have an ABN number; some of them just work for a personal contract. Some of them are cleaners—what is the matter with an honest day's work as a cleaner? But you have to be given some relief in the taxation system, as we have done by reducing the tax rate from 30 per cent to 28½ per cent and, of course, there was a tax offset of 20 per cent for those who were willing to invest in new equipment. That was an absolute boon and I will refer to that later on.

We on this side of the House know something about small business. My wife and I dared to venture into a small business by owning a bakery. It started off as an absolutely marvellous thing to do. It was delivering a very good result until the shopping centre decided to destroy most of the businesses in the shopping centre by developing it and then bringing in competitors. We were a sole baker and, by the time we had finished, there were four bakeries in that shopping centre. They were more interested in selling space than they were in maintaining their tenants. That is the sort of thing that small business people go through all the time. I do not want to be too partisan, because I see the member for Chifley nodding, so I will try and be as generous as possible. But if you go through the list of people on our side of the House, you will see we come from very diverse backgrounds. The member for Canberra says that she is a small business woman of 10 years experience and I take that as a statement of fact. I have heard her speak here before. I actually listened to her maiden speech and she is somebody who does know something about small business. But there are not many on that side who have had to use their own hard-earned cash—

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