Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023. As soon as you even hear that title 'closing the loopholes bill' you know you have to start looking through the keyholes as to exactly what the wider implications of this are. The electorate of New England is home to many agricultural manufacturing businesses. In fact we actually have manufacturing in New England. BOSS Engineering manufactures the biggest farm machinery implements pulled by a tractor in the world. It's growing flat out, and we want it to keep growing. We have other manufacturing businesses in the blue-collar areas of Tamworth, and obviously mining is another big employer in our area—not so much the mines in the electorate but the mines right next to the electorate. The biggest thing we want to do is keep businesses profitable. You can have all the laws you like, but if the business stops employing people, if it doesn't work, then everybody loses out.

One of the issues we've seen where this is especially pronounced is in the motel industry, and without naming them, we have real issues in the motel industry with people saying, 'I just can't do it anymore. It just doesn't work.' They have issues because they can't get access to foreign workers, they have issues because their power bills are through the roof, they have issues because their gas bills are through the roof and they have issues because of the pressure coming onto them, and now they have this IR legislation that comes in over the top.

From a distance what we see, unfortunately, with government is there's no holistic view of how you deal with this. We're seeing this in so many parts, and this is yet another example. In their power policy the ultimate result is power prices going through the roof and reliability going through the floor. They're overseas companies. The money is going overseas. We just finished a water debate—sounds great. But a whole lot of people who've got five showers and three toilets are developing policy for people who live on the other side of the range and will go broke.

Now we have got this legislation, the Fair Work legislation amendment. It's coming from a party who are decent people—there are no problems about that. But they don't know how to run businesses. Running a business is a precarious thing. I've done it myself. I still do it now for the family business. It's a precarious thing. Nothing is certain. One of the great fears you have when you're starting a business is called Friday, because that's when you have to pay the wages, and if it's not quite there, if the people who owe you money have not quite paid up as they should, then you're balancing the issues with the overdraft. Every week is clawing ahead. What you've got to try and do is work with people who employ people, because the overwhelming employment, where the money is generated, is from private enterprise. Governments spend money, and government services rely on the taxpayer who's in private enterprise, the wages from private enterprise and the PAYG to actually support the government.

What's proposed is this bill adds yet another layer of complexity for the person trying to administer the payroll to go home and say, 'Well, I don't know about this family business. I don't know why we do it. It uses all our time. It stresses us out. There's always this belief that we're ripping people off. We're not. We're just trying to get by.' It doesn't enhance competition, and most likely some of these people who have been under the pump now will just say, 'I've had enough. I'm out. I'm over it. I'm going to find myself another way to earn the money.'

The other problem we've got goes back to motel businesses. Once these businesses are so under the pump because of power prices, gas prices, overheads and obviously wages, when they go to sell their business, they've got no-one to sell it to—not if the prospective buyer has a decent accountant, because they'll go through the books and say, 'Why on earth would you buy this? It just doesn't make any money.' If you think that doesn't happen, I can assure you, in my experience as an accountant, it has. I remember a motel—I won't say where—as their accountant, we sold it for $1, because there was no point in owning it. All it was was a bad risk. It made no money, and you just had to find some poor unfortunate person to take over this person's problems. In the end that was an incredibly good move for them, because they went on and made money in another area, to come to that decision to say, 'Just flip it.'

Why I bring that story up is that with this legislation you think of BHP or you think of Coles or you think of Woolies, but that's a small section of business. The largest section are tomato growers in the Bowen—like the member who has just walked in—

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