Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

If you want to see the contempt that the Albanese government has for families, households and small businesses, you just need to see the arrogance of the Prime Minister in question time. Every time we get up to ask a simple question about the survival of small businesses, he shuts down question time, and he has good reason to do so, because the simple reality is we had more small business insolvencies in the Commonwealth last year than we have had in Australian history.

I hear the heckling from the Minister for Small Business on the other side of this chamber. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if I saw a record number of small businesses crushed under my administration, but the minister sits there peacocking, proudly saying that she is proud of her record, when she should be ashamed. Forty-thousand small businesses have been crushed into insolvency under the Albanese government. This is not something to be proud of. It is something to be embarrassed about and ashamed of, because sitting behind every one of those small businesses are the livelihoods, the incomes, the dignity and the pride of Australians backing themselves to get ahead. What they are living with right now is increased costs not just from the explicit increase in interest rates and inflation but from a cost-of-business crisis. Millions of Australian small businesses are struggling to keep their heads above the inflation water level. They are experiencing costs pushed down onto their small businesses, harming their profitability.

This morning I met with people from the restaurant and food sector. Their profit margins have simply collapsed. The capacity for a small business to be opened to serve Australians has declined so much that one in nine Australian small businesses in the restaurant and hospitality sector has closed. It is an extraordinary record of this government and something that it should be ashamed of.

But it's not just the inflation impact. With state governments indexing so many of their taxes to inflation, we're seeing a direct hit from increases in inflation, a second hit through interest rates, a third hit through the cost of taxation inflation and, in fact, a fourth hit directly as a consequence of the Labor government's industrial relations agenda, which is pushing on inflationary costs further for small business and making it harder not just for small businesses to get ahead but for households to stay ahead. So many are being pushed to the wall.

What is going on with that? It isn't just a small business, as critical as that is. Sitting behind those millions of small businesses are employees—young Australians who are getting their first job, people who depend on small business for an income. When a small business collapses, the wage disappears. It seems like a simple truth, but, when you have a small business collapse, the jobs go with it. There are no taxes paid, there is no income and there is no super on a job that doesn't exist, and this is the lived reality under the Albanese government.

We know that, as of 2 February of this year, 41,749 businesses have gone bust under the Albanese government. In construction, it's 10,757. It's 6,487 in accommodation and food services; 2,046 in manufacturing; 1,168 in health care or social assistance; 541 in agriculture, forestry and fisheries; and 406 in education and training. While the minister on the other side of the table likes to boast about her record, she cannot hide from some simple facts. The 33,426 fewer employing small businesses in Australia—

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