Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm in furious agreement with member for Adelaide when he says that we need to do all we can to help small businesses. Indeed, he is right. He talked about the instant asset write-off, but what the member for Adelaide didn't tell the chamber was how much the instant asset write-off is worth. I can tell you: it's $20,000. What was it worth under the coalition? It was unlimited. Admittedly, that was a COVID stimulus, but before that it was a lot higher than $20,000. They say it's a promise and that they've written it into the next budget. This is something that our small businesses look to to provide the investment that they need in their businesses, but Labor just trots it out each year.

Why not just put it in as a permanent rate and make it unlimited? Yes, it's a cost to the economy. Yes, it's a cost to the government. But it gives small businesses the assurance that they can invest, knowing that this is something they are going to be able to bank on in the future. What they can't bank on at the moment is this government. What the 2.7 million small businesses of Australia can't bank on is reliability from this government.

We ask ourselves, 'What is the definition of a small business?' Well, it was probably a medium sized business when we were in government. Deputy Speaker, as the member for the fine city of Gladstone in the fine electorate of Flynn, you would know full well the benefit of small business. You would also know full well—I'm not trying to badger you—the fact that small businesses are at the moment encountering a 32.2 per cent rise in electricity costs just in the last 12 months. How do they cope? How do they, as the member for Adelaide says, keep the doors of business open when they're paying more and more and more for their power bills? Energy is the economy. While Labor have got energy policies that are going to hurt small business by way of rising power bills, you're going to hurt those small businesses—small businesses, I might add, which are going out backwards at a rate of a thousand per day. That's an alarming figure. In four years we've actually seen 40,000 of them go bankrupt—not just close their doors but indeed go belly up.

Labor come in here with talking points about how they're securing the prosperity of small businesses. Well, they are not. Labor members—most of them—have never seen a small business that they wouldn't like to run a picket line out the front of. Not many of them have actually ever run a small business. They've come up here through the staff or they've come up here through the union movement, but none of them have ever got their fingernails dirty owning and operating a small business, starting at dawn, finishing at midnight and doing it every day, day after day, and then taking home less pay than the workers themselves. I say shame on Labor because they should go into their own electorates, go into a small business and see what's driving them. See how hard they're hurting at the moment, because they are indeed hurting. They're really, really doing it tough.

What they're going to be encountering next, particularly in regional Australia—I'm glad the member for Leichhardt is here—is a rising cost of fuel. Indeed, there's a price spike caused by what happened in Iran at the weekend. Following attacks on Iran, oil prices surged on 2 March, with Brent crude rising around 7.4 per cent to up to as much as $82 per barrel. It was $67 a barrel before this happened. Shane Wright, the economist from the Sydney Morning Herald, suggested yesterday on Insiders that it could get as high as $100 a barrel. I know Labor came in, and the Treasurer, the member for Rankin, was very fond of saying that the fuel price was caused by Ukraine. He'll use this as an excuse now. It's always, 'The dog ate my homework,' with the Treasurer. There's always that excuse.

Labor, and the Treasurer in particular, have the levers available to them to fix the economy, to help small business, yet all they do is to come in here with their talking points and read them assiduously. Do something about actually genuinely helping small business. Go into a small business—not just a coffee maker but the little owner-operators, the bespoke stores, the unique stores in your own electorates—and talk to them. More importantly, listen to them. Then come back and explain to the parliament what you're genuinely doing to help those small business operators who are doing it really, really tough at the moment. They need our genuine help, not just as a parliament but as consumers ourselves.

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