Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the motion. It's a shame that I missed the member for Goldstein being able to make a speech here, because he usually provides enormous material to respond to that the member for Venning, unfortunately, in what was essentially a very sensible speech, wasn't able to provide.

I'm somebody who has run a small business. I'm somebody who came into small business in my late 20s when I had a contract mustering business around my home town of Broken Hill, which essentially was a bike, a ute, a pack of dogs and the will to win, which is the most essential part of any small business. It did give me an experience to learn what it means to create something out of nothing. When I say that, it's not necessarily out of nothing; small business is about putting together all of those sort of disparate elements together into something where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

That gave me my first taste, and then I got right into business. I really was taken by the idea of what entrepreneurialism actually meant. I ended up running a construction company for many years. What I learnt from that is that it's a bit like that saying, you should run a country in the same way that you run a business. There are two ways to run a business. One is to strip all the profits out of it and run it into the ground. And the other is to invest in your plant and your people. And I think that we know what the Labor way is. It is to invest in your people and in your infrastructure in the country.

Running a business in Australia is dependent on so many of those infrastructure things around it. That's why, in postwar Australia, Labor and the coalition really did work together on this idea that we would build public housing, not out of the goodness of our hearts and not necessarily just to look after the people that were really battling but for railway workers, for car workers and for teachers. The whole idea was that we would provide that public housing to keep the cost of living down, to keep those rents down and to take the pressure off wages, which, in turn, would help business.

It's the same as it was with public energy. We used to provide public energy as a way of keeping that cost of living down and also keeping those costs down for business—which also helped business. And it's the same with something like Medicare. Before Medicare was introduced, paying medical bills was one of the biggest causes of bankruptcy. Medicare helps small business. In the United States it's up to small business to provide those health cover costs, but in Australia we're able to provide a direct service not only to keep the workforce healthy but also to take economic pressure off an individual or off a business having to provide that health insurance themselves. It's the same with training. It's the same with tax cuts and with superannuation. It's about taking a collective approach to these things which are effectively essential services in the economy, to help the economy grow and to help businesses to succeed.

Unfortunately, as I said, we missed the member for Goldstein—now the shadow Treasurer—who I think would have been able to defend some of his statements on why he doesn't believe in superannuation, why he doesn't believe in Medicare and why he is probably the most radical person to ever take the position of shadow Treasurer in the coalition. It's a shame that he is not here to explain why he thinks stripping away all of those benefits is actually going to help small business. It's a shame that he's not here to explain why he thinks that privatising Medicare would actually help small business. It's up to him to explain why he thinks taking away superannuation would ultimately help small business. So it's a shame. This debate, which he moved, has been the poorer for it; it would have really exposed where the coalition is on this. The Labor Party is the one that's taking the sensible position of growing our economy, of investing in our people and of investing in our infrastructure for the benefit of the whole economy.

See this speech in context