Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a privilege to follow the member for Riverina. I associate myself with his remarks about Mr Bruce Billson, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman. That is an incredibly important role. It's a statutory role. It has responsibilities for mediation, where small businesses find themselves in a David-and-Goliath situation. Anyone who knows Bruce Billson knows he is an absolute evangelist for small business. He has lived it and breathed it over many, many years, and I too want to pay tribute to his record of service, not just as a former small-business minister in this place but in his time as the Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman. I wish him and his wife, Kate, all the very best for their next steps.

This is an important opportunity to talk about small business in Australia because, right now, small-business owners have never worked harder for less or faced more risk and red tape. I'm a passionate believer that strong businesses sustain strong communities. I see that every single day of the week in my electorate of Monash, where small-business owners are the first to put their hands up to sponsor the local footy team or sporting organisation. It's small businesses that are the first to put their hands up to volunteer at a service club, with a Lions barbecue or with Rotary. We very much rely on those organisations in regional Australia. So I pay tribute to the mum-and-dad small business owners. Every morning they get out of bed, they put their house on the line to give someone else a shot at a job, and they're doing it tough right now. The input costs across so many areas are going up and up. The risks of being in business are going up and up. Having grown up in my parents' family-run small business, I would see them answer phone calls from customers on a Sunday night and work late into the night on BAS statements. I know so many small businesses across this country are doing it tough with lean margins. They will pay their staff before they get paid. They will make sure that their customers are delivered for. They will always put themselves last; they put their community first. They look after their staff, and they are the unsung heroes of this country.

I want to talk specifically about the conversation at the moment on the RBA's review into merchant card surcharging, because this is a conversation that's been going on for a number of years now. It is one that, when I was CEO of a national small business organisation a few years ago, I remember engaging in a discussion on, because it's an important issue for many small business owners. The technology that's developed across that time—the scale, pace and acceleration of new technology that's come in since there were cheques and old-style merchant facilities—has changed rapidly. So, as a parliament setting regulatory systems and legislative changes, we need to make sure that we're keeping up with best practice and that we're having regard for cyber security concerns. We've seen many of those in recent years at a consumer level, where there's been sensitive health and financial data breached. We need to make sure that the RBA are not left alone to deal with those challenges, given their very narrow remit. So the government has announced that it will ban debit card surcharges, and that's subject to further work by the RBA.

I want to have consideration in my remarks for, most of all, small businesses and consumers, because right now the cost of living is going up and up. I get emails every week from constituents that have said, 'My energy bill has gone up yet again.' Everybody is doing it really tough right now. We need to make sure consumers and small businesses are not wearing the cost impost of large organisations, especially large multinational organisations which are perhaps skimming the cream on support and subsidies that are meant to provide for those in a less profitable situation. I will be raising a couple of key measures which I believe the government and the RBA should be adopting in making sure these considerations are best regarded, and that includes enforcing a separation of debit from credit card merchant service fees. This includes no blending of debit and credit. If you've got a credit card where you're earning Qantas points and a whole range of other benefits, that should be treated differently to, say, an EFTPOS card, which is a bare basic. It's your money that you're using to pay for a can of Coke or a meal at the pub, and that should be dealt with separately. I'd like to see the mandating of dynamic least-cost routing on debit card transactions. I'm also putting forward that a delay in the implementation of any proposed surcharge ban for 12 months is a sensible thing to do to allow time for small-to-medium businesses to switch providers, revise their contracts and look for better options.

I think a number of companies have been established in recent years, and some of those include Square and Stripe. These are big tech companies that are paired with big tech providers like Apple and Google, and they're the ones profiting in these situations. The assistance is not being carried through to SMEs and consumers. I think also reducing debit interchange close to zero, which has been recommended by the Productivity Commission, is something else that needs to be proceeded with.

While the RBA is still reviewing this matter, I would also countenance that its proposal does not go far enough in properly addressing a number of factors which are live issues at the moment: insufficient reduction in costs for card users and businesses; the increased costs to users of cash; ensuring banks don't pass on forward costs incurred overseas to Australian card presence fees; failing to ensure debit card providers are not subsidising the reward schemes, as I referenced earlier, of credit card users; not mandating to require payment providers to process all transactions using the least cost route; unnecessarily high profit margins on small business transactions compared to big business transactions, which is also something that we need to have regard for; and the steady increase of merchant card fees are all things we need to take into account.

The coalition's position on this bill is that we support the objectives but have serious concern about the lack of parliamentary oversight over the Reserve Bank and the Treasurer's decisions in this area. Having said that, if our amendments fail, the coalition will not oppose the bill. Quite broadly, the law that regulates our payment systems is the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1988. It is a number of decades since it was initiated into law. The technology and systems used since that time have dramatically scaled up. About 25 years ago cheques, EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard were the only ways Australians paid. That's changed now. We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, crypto and blockchain systems. We also need to have regard that, when regulators are given sweeping powers over fast-moving competitive industries, parliament must have the ability to review those decisions.

Those decisions have a significant impact on regional Australia, which is where my first concerns always lie and are founded in. If I think of the Monash electorate and the Gippsland region, of which I'm a part, we're very proud to grow, make and manufacture things. About 23 per cent of Australia's milk output comes from our region. About 26 per cent of Victoria's beef comes from our region. We're very proud of the clean green horticulture produce we make, which is sought the world over. But there is an ecosystem of small to medium businesses that rely on all of those producers and all of those links in our region to get their products to market quickly and efficiently and to provide for consumers. Small businesses in my region have a number of other challenges they're contending with at the moment. Even though we have the best soil in Australia and are normally in a bit of a rain cloud, we are suffering a green drought at the moment, so I'm speaking on a weekly basis with farmers who are forced to sell off stock early. That is going to be affecting their liabilities in their tax bill with the ATO.

As I mentioned in my inaugural speech, I'm a passionate believer—as the Prime Minister once said many moons ago, when he was infrastructure minister—that infrastructure is a primary enabler of productivity, so roads and routes to market in my electorate to get products safely and efficiently to their destination are something I'm particularly passionate about. Around 40 per cent of my region is towns under a thousand people. Some of the small towns are tourist towns where there is a vibrant small business network. They're timber towns too, although thanks to the Victorian Labor government those timber towns and timber jobs are becoming fewer and fewer. They're very important too. If it's towns like Noojee, Neerim South, Walhalla, Erica, Rawson and Loch, I will always do my utmost to make sure their concerns and their challenges are best represented.

I'm proud to have worked in the timber industry, which is a great enabler and supporter of a broader system of small businesses. I previously served on the board of Australian Sustainable Hardwoods in Heyfield, and I acknowledge Ian Jones, the chief financial officer there, who, after many decades, will be retiring in October this year. That timber mill makes sure that it's economic for the IGA truck coming into town with groceries to return to Melbourne with a trailer full of timber. They support the timber museum and the Heyfield Lions Club. They do so much for that community, and that's demonstrative of why that quantum of heavy industry is important in regions like ours to support small businesses.

I've always very strongly believed that a strong economy is the best way to support the most vulnerable people in our community, to protect our environment and to invest in education, because without a strong economy we can't achieve any of those things. Small business is a key part of that. About 44 per cent of Australian jobs are in a small business, and that's why there are considerations such as those contained in this bill. It's incredibly important that we always look after Australian small-business owners as we work our way through these legislative processes.

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