Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Good question. I will deal first with the opposition member who interjected, ‘What about small business?’ That is good question. We have actually got a huge stimulus package aimed at small business. It is about reducing red tape, bureaucracy. It is about accessing the tax system, about the way that they pay tax, about arrangements in terms of depreciation. It is about putting money into people’s pockets so they put it back into the retail sector, which supports small business, which keeps jobs in small business. You cannot separate them. This is what the opposition fail to understand. They try to separate the injection of cash into the economy as a stimulus, and jobs. We have all the evidence of it now. It is irrefutable. Retail sales in Australia went up. In contrast to every other economy in the world, ours were the only ones that went up—and they went up directly on the back of our stimulus package in that period. Now, that is not something that happens in isolation. What that did was keep people in jobs. It kept people in retail employment—

See this speech in context