Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always a pleasure to rise in this chamber and speak about the importance of small business and the way that this government is supporting small business not only across my community but also the country. As I look across my community and meet regularly with small to medium business owners, I reflect on the fact that every one of them each and every day puts everything on the line to generate wealth for their family; however, they are also building businesses to create job opportunities for others in our community and help them build their wealth and family finances. Small business is such an important component of our economy because they are prepared to take those risks.

Generally, they will be the businesses that are being innovative and looking to change things and for better ways to do things. We know that, once you get big corporates and their big bureaucracies, their ability to change and adapt is much more difficult. But small businesses need to be nimble, flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions because they don't have the financial and other resources the big end of town has. Small to medium businesses always have limitations that the big end of town doesn't have. Their cost of capital is higher and the cost of regulation for small to medium business is always far higher than it is for big business because they have the resources to cope with and adapt to it.

This is why it is so important in my view that we, as a government, seek to support small business throughout our community to ensure they can grow and prosper. Each and every day, businesses like Swagman motorhomes, Lumini, Noonan race engineering or CGI manufacturing take the opportunity to provide services for Australians. Increasingly, they're looking to export and are taking advantage of the export opportunities created by this government through our free trade agreements. They're also able to take advantage of things like the instant asset write-off which makes it easier for them to manage their finances and accounts.

There are other things that we're doing. The Minister for Small and Family Business, the Workplace and Deregulation is here, and I know he and I regularly talk about the importance of small business and the things we're doing practically to help small business—whether it's cutting the amount of tax they have to pay or, importantly, as I touched on before, cutting the amount of red tape they have to deal with. We have succeeded in reducing some $6 billion worth of red tape out of the system, which is incredibly important to our small to medium businesses. That is something this government has achieved. We've also, as I touched on, implemented the free trade agreements. We've changed section 46 of the competition act to provide a fairer, more level playing field for small to medium-sized businesses. We've implemented an unfair-contract arrangement. The reason we're doing all of these things is to try to create an ecosystem that creates the encouragement and the opportunity for small businesses to grow and prosper, because they are the majority employer in this country.

We're also looking to work out how we can provide the opportunity for people who leave the workforce as employees to become business owners in their later years. Those opportunities ensure that people have the ability to continue to build wealth and contribute to this society as they change jobs. We all know now that staying in one job for your whole life is highly unlikely and that you're going to have a number of different jobs, so it is important that we create the opportunity for those who are of mature age. If they want to leave the workforce as an employee, they should have the opportunity to start their own business. My question to the minister is: how is the government encouraging those mature-age Australians to start a small business should they choose to do so?

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