Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

You on the other side might scoff, but I can tell you that I have plenty of people in my electorate who had the same issue. Sometimes I think that the other side is living in some sort of virtual monopoly world and in some sort of high school economics class; they get up and, because they say it is so, therefore it is so. I know that we do not want to go into the past, but the other side has form on this.

In my first venture into business on my own in 1988 we purchased a property. We borrowed the money at 12 per cent. Within 10 months we were paying 22 per cent. That was in Paul Keating’s recession that we had to have. It took 10 years of making interest payments and not being able to pay the principal back, so I come to this place with a little knowledge of what financial mismanagement from governments, particularly Labor governments, can do to small business.

The stimulus package has had an overall negative impact right throughout my electorate. With the dollar at US92c any positive impact that it could have made has been gobbled up. The majority of my small business owners are in the primary production sector. They have got grain prices at record lows not just because the government abolished the orderly marketing system that wheat farmers had in place but also because, with the dollar at US92c and interest rates going up, we now have financial institutions starting to wind up, closing up on loans and foreclosing on small businesses because money is tight.

We have businesses that are trying to get started in a practical way, demonstrating a desire to overcome the emissions of this country. I have providers of alternative sources of energy. I have wind farms, proposals for solar farms and a gas fired power station. The impediment to their schemes is the inability to get finance. The government is gobbling up all the borrowings at such a rapid rate to meet its massive borrowings and its spending—its useless school spending—has taken out funding at a rapid rate.

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