A lot of people, certainly on this side of the chamber but around Australia, are very confused as to why the government appears to be waging war on small business. They're asking us, and if they're not asking you they will be soon.

I just don't understand it myself, but I've got a hint yesterday when we had the start of question time and we asked the Prime Minister a question about small business. The body language and the words were instructive. It was a motherhood statement about how the Albanese government backs small business. He said it in a very quiet voice. He didn't seem to really believe it. The next question was a question about political events and Josh Frydenberg. All of a sudden, the Prime Minister was animated: 'Oh, Josh Frydenberg!' I wish the Prime Minister would get as animated about the plight of people in private enterprise around Australia as he does about people who are serving, or who have served, in this place. It was instructive.

Small businesses across Australia are having very, very difficult conversations with their financial advisers at the moment. They're coming into my office. If they're not coming into yours, they soon will be. People who don't really get involved in politics much at all are suddenly discovering with horror what some of these changes to trust arrangements and taxation arrangements actually mean for their business. I had a business owner in my office yesterday who has spent 45 years building this business up almost in tears because of what these changes mean. This person followed the rules and set his business up in a way with trusts, as has been legal, and all of a sudden the rug has been pulled out from underneath.

I don't know whether this person voted Labor or who he voted for to be honest, but he said, 'They didn't tell us that this was on the table before the election.' 'That's fundamentally deceitful,' this small business owner said to me, and he's right. Small business is basically putting your own effort, your own labour, your own capital and in many cases your credit on the line and hoping that you can manage input costs of an operation so that the income will be enough to turn a small profit or get a small margin. We should be helping them in that endeavour, not treating them like a cash register for the government coffers. They are suffering energy costs, which are going up despite being them told that they were going to be reduced.

We're talking about farmers. Farmers in my part of the world are also suffering, as the member for Riverina said, from rising temporary water prices. Why is that? It's because the government has taken so much water out of what we call the consumptive pool that the prices are going up, and it's making it very, very difficult for farmers to be able to purchase that water and irrigate fruit trees, dairy pastures and other crops. In many cases, they're getting less for their commodities as well. Those small businesses are under pressure, and the Labor government has put them under more pressure with these policies.

The amount of red tape that businesses report having to go through with state and federal governments—and I'm from Victoria, so I know what a state Labor government looks like. I hope we are in the last 30 or 40 days of this one, I can tell you. People who put their, as I said, labour, capital, credit and effort on the line get very upset when the government wants to clip the ticket on everything they do. The margins are so tight. An example of the government not understanding margins at all is thinking that if you ban a credit card surcharge then somehow the cost goes away, that the bank will say, 'Oh well; there's no charge for that anymore.' They can't pass that on. They have to absorb it or they have to lift their prices.

Here in Canberra, here in the ACT, there is some small business and some capitalism going on—thank goodness—and a restaurant owner told me: 'It's so hard, because what do we do? We have to absorb all we have to lift our prices, but it's a competitive environment.' It's so difficult. I don't understand why the Labor government is making it more difficult for small business, but the juxtaposition between the Prime Minister talking about small business and Josh Frydenberg gave us a hint.