Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This is all about jobs. Right across Australia today there are thousands of small businesses struggling with a slowing economy and rising unemployment. They are concerned about how they will be able to maintain people on their payroll. They are focused on jobs. Thousands of those small businesses are in the state of Queensland, and they are weighing up the rising risk of a Rudd recession. They are looking at all of the policies of this government, each and every one of them, and measuring their effect against the results. We know what the results have been: they have been slowing economic growth and growth going into reverse, with the likelihood that the March quarter will be negative too and we will in every sense be in a recession with rising unemployment. That is what Australia’s small businesses are about, and nowhere more so than in Queensland, because nowhere more so than in Queensland do we have small businesses built around the hospitality industry.

Let’s look to see what industry is actually saying. What are the retailers saying? The Australian Retailers Association welcomed the vote last night because they recognise the change that was made to the definition of ‘small business’ for this purpose to 20 full-time equivalents was good for jobs. They made the point that:

Without this redefinition of small business, unfair dismissal laws in the Government’s Fair Work Bill will destroy small business confidence to employ staff and we cannot afford this in the current economic climate.

We can look at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. ACCI has been quoted extensively by the government lately, so I am sure that they will be very interested to listen to what ACCI has had to say about jobs, which is the real issue. They have said about the change that we supported in the Senate early this morning:

The change is necessary because the employment mix in small business has changed over the years, and past unfair dismissal laws dented the confidence of small businesses to employ permanent staff. Especially now, business confidence is crucial to jobs, and small business is the jobs engine of the economy.

So these two representative organisations, both representing small businesses, both representing businesses that are particularly vulnerable to these laws, are calling for the government to be reasonable and to do what we did all the time in government and accept Senate amendments. We recognised that this is a parliament of two houses, and we recognised changes imposed on many occasions by the Senate.

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