Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The small business community have been completely ignored by this Gillard government but are at the pointy end of the carbon tax. Nowhere has this government done any meaningful analysis on the impact of the world's largest carbon tax on the engine room of the Australian economy. If it were not bad enough for small business to be recording a 48 per cent increase in small business insolvencies over the last 12 months and a 95 per cent reduction in small business start-ups, an attack on enterprise, 14½ thousand employing small businesses now not employing Australians right across our continent—a reduction in the share of private sector workforce engaged by small business—the government comes up with a cunning plan, a plan that has no greater adverse impact on any sector of the economy than the small business community, and that is the carbon tax.

This was the carbon tax that small business was promised it would not have to face. Remember those infamous words: 'There shall be no carbon tax under a government I lead'? Those were the words of the Prime Minister seeking re-election. Yet, just a few short years later, here we are, facing the world's largest carbon tax and also facing a further attack on the small business community that this government just seem not to care about.

You heard today the confused message of this government. They were saying how wrong it was for the coalition to highlight that small businesses will be faced with higher costs, how their input costs will go up, how refrigerants will go through the roof, how the cost of their inputs will also go up and how the cost of fuel and other crucial components of a small business doing its business will go up under Labor's carbon tax. We were told: 'No, no; that is wrong. You are just frightening people.' Yet, when it suited, when it was convenient for the government to come at exactly the same topic from another angle and say, 'Oh but there is compensation to account for these cost increases'—arising from the carbon tax that they have just gone on saying that small business was not going to face—we get a completely contradictory story from this government.

Little wonder then that the small business community is completely bewildered by what the government is up to. Many took the government at its word that small businesses would not have to plan for a carbon tax. Yet here they are, confronted with the world's largest carbon tax. Small business heard week after week about the carve-outs, and the compensation that everyone was going to get, and how this would be such a soft landing of a carbon tax, only to find now that the only people to miss out on any direct support whatsoever are the small business community. They have not got any of the hush money that is being dished out to Alcoa. They have not got any of the bailouts—the 'Let's hope that the economic and employment consequences of the carbon tax can be pushed further away from its introduction date'—payments.

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