Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Under the policies of your side of the government, 519,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector. The small business sector share of private sector employment declined from 53 per cent to 43 per cent under your policies. For those that believe in the ideology that big is best, there are a few things that I would like to point them to. Firstly, there is a beast called pig No. 6707. This was conceived in a laboratory in the US Department of Agriculture in the 1990s because they believed that it would be best if they could make the pigs bigger and bigger. But what they produced was 'a beast that was excessively hairy, riddled with arthritis and cross-eyed; too lethargic to stand, let alone mate'.

The delusion that big is best is one of the reasons why the socialist economies of the old Eastern Bloc failed. They did not understand the importance of innovation. Those that believe that big is best should perhaps look at the problems with what is called island gigantism, where the size of animals on an isolated island, shielded from the natural competition, increases dramatically compared to the size of animals on the mainland. Examples are the elephant bird of Madagascar, the moa and the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant rabbits of the Mediterranean and, of course, the famed dodo bird. Without effective competition, as soon as more competition was introduced these things were simply too big and they failed and became extinct.

I would put to you that our business sector here in Australia is in danger of falling to the evils of island gigantism. We have seen many sectors of our economy where people have the ideology that big is better. We have seen our industries grow and grow to where we simply have oligopolistic industries in almost every sector of the economy. This is not because bigger is more efficient; it is because of the way that government have set up the laws. We have seen that the rule of law—such an important factor in a productive economy—in this country is broken. A small business in a legal dispute with a larger business simply cannot win because it cannot finance the legal cost. We have seen the broken market for retail rents in this country where, because of government interference in the market and zoning laws to protect large retailers, there is the most distorted market where a large retailer will be paying two to three per cent of their turnover in rent while a smaller retailer will be paying 20 to 25 per cent. We have seen it in our failed competition laws. We have allowed anticompetitive price discrimination to take hold across the board.

I think this one M Latham, the former Labor leader, gives it away when he talks in his article about his concern regarding the decline of union membership, because Labor knows in those large companies it is much easier to line up the workers—line them up in lines—and sign them up to union membership. It was an appalling, terrible article by the former member for Werriwa. (Time expired)

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