Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You were very good to me to not cite relevance, but thank you for letting me deliver that important anecdote about entrepreneurship. Ultimately what we want is private provision of these services that is efficient. If you take a small business that operates cancer treatments, they have just 11 people per linear accelerator and deliver cancer-treating services all over this country. Today, as soon as you step into a public hospital in New South Wales, there are 23 people running around that same linear accelerator doing 50 per cent fewer treatments. Please think about it. There are nearly double the number of people scurrying around the machine, from nuclear physicians through to cleaners, seeing 50 per cent fewer patients and treating them for their cancer. If it is your relative waiting for public cancer care, how do you feel about being told there is no treatment for six weeks because 'we are full'? You are not full; you are just not efficient and you are using way too many people to do way too few services.

I can understand that in the public system the slower you work, the more money you save, but that should not be how our health system works. At the moment, in too many state systems, it is. That is why the small business notion of having some competition in the area of cancer care is so important. In this case they are incorporated small businesses, but it makes no difference; they all have to start from somewhere. Our great small businesses often begin as unincorporated entities.

If you are living in a remote community, you deserve to be able to start a small business and give it a go, but there are so many Indigenous Australians who would love to give it a go and cannot. One of the great achievements of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, Alan Tudge, is his determination to see basic ratios of government contracting going to Indigenous owned and controlled business. That is a really important start. But federally we do not control a great deal of that sector. We need the states and territories to agree to the same thing. When there is work to be done in the community, let it be done by the local people.

Was that Labor's approach? Of course not. They trucked in the bureaucrats and they called in the remote housing providers and they built houses for Indigenous Australians while Indigenous Australians were spectators. Since when was housing construction a spectator sport? The argument was that they had to build these houses quickly. They were built quickly, badly and wastefully, when a small business incorporated in each of those communities could have done that work, could have given basic skills to young Indigenous people to erect dwellings. They are flat packed these days. They come in on a truck and they are up in four weeks. It is not a complex job anymore. It simply needs to be supervised by someone who knows how to do it. We could have done that in every community. We passed it up. That generation of young Indigenous Australians never had a chance to be part of their own small business. They were occasionally allowed to sweep the slab in the morning as part of their mutual obligation, and then they were sat on the side while the driven-in employees, who were mostly from large towns and cities, did the job. That was a disgrace and that was a passed-up opportunity that could have seen trained tradesmen, young Indigenous tradies, now travelling around remote Australia doing the work in other communities. Forget that. Labor blew it.

Now what we have is a government absolutely committed to small business; we are obviously committed to tax cuts but, more importantly, to tax cuts for 70 per cent of unincorporated small businesses. As I said, do not believe me—listen to ACCI. They acknowledge small business is the engine room of the Australian economy. They know you need to be able to immediately deduct these legitimate professional costs associated with setting up. What is the point of celebrating the fact that you tell people to wait up to five years to write stuff off when your business, more than likely, will not even exist then? We have to give them a start. We have to cultivate small business. We have to encourage Australians to have a go. I have made my point that that needs to be in Indigenous Australia. I have made my point that it needs to be within my electorate. I have made my point that we need to recognise the importance of entrepreneurship and of small business having a go. We need to recognise and salute people who have chosen that as their profession, thank them for the fact that Australia has one of the strongest small business sectors in the world and recognise that only the coalition is looking after their interests.

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