Imagine yourself so lucky as to be in the shoes of a customer walking into a cafe in Dunsborough in my own electorate this summer—one of the prime tourist hotspots of the South West and, certainly, Australia as a nation—and, at the checkout, telling the owner of the cafe that they can no longer place a surcharge on your bill, making that cafe owner absorb the cost of that transaction themselves. In response, the cafe owner tells you, 'Well, you can't use your card at all because I'm not prepared to wear the card fee.' Now, I don't think that would happen, because, like many small businesses around Australia, no-one in the South West would do that to their customers lest they feel the wrath of angry Google reviews and the impact it has on their revenue.

But that is exactly what has happened to small businesses across Australia: the Australian tax office has banned them from using credit card payments. Of course, there has been a somewhat stay of execution for a few months through to the middle of next year, but let's take a step back and examine how this whole saga unfolded. On 1 October the ban on card surcharges took effect. The Reserve Bank made the decision that the Prime Minister was very quick out of the gates to claim as a win while marketing it as a cost-of-living relief measure and proudly posing for Instagram videos and the like. What it meant was that, from that morning on, small businesses—which are going bankrupt at a faster rate than at any point in Australian history, I might add—had to absorb the cost of card fees.

On the very same day, the Australian tax office announced it would stop accepting card payments from small businesses because it didn't want to absorb the fees that every small and family owned business in Australia was made to absorb on the very same day. The Australian chamber of commerce described it as a double standard, which is perhaps the most polite expression I've come across for it, because it is hard to describe it in any other way and it is certainly hard to describe it as fair. If it is good enough for the local cafe owner in Dunsborough, why isn't it good enough for the Commonwealth of Australia? Businesses were given two months notice in the busiest part of the tax year, and two days later the Prime Minister had to step in to clean up yet another mess from the Treasurer and bail out the Australian tax office to the sum of $200 million for this financial year. The government has been caught out of touch on this one.

The Treasurer says he became aware of the ATO's plan in late September, but the Assistant Treasurer told the ABC's Insiders that the government knew in July. So either the Treasurer wasn't told by his own junior minister or he hasn't been straight with the Australian people. On the very same program of Insiders the Assistant Treasurer said the ATO bailout 'would have very serious fiscal ramifications for the budget'—but apparently the Albanese government was very happy for those same 'very serious' implications for every small and family owned business across Australia. Is it any wonder that they are collapsing at a record rate? This is a government that's spending at its highest level in more than 40 years outside the pandemic. Debt has ticked past a trillion dollars, yet the same government decided that $200 million in card fees was a cost it could not carry out of a budget of more than $850 billion a year in revenue. That certainly doesn't sound like cost-of-living relief to me. It sounds like more smoke and mirrors from a government that cannot be straight with the Australian people.

The Treasurer was asked whether he'd been rolled by the Prime Minister, and he firmly denied it. But the same treasurer who had sat on this news since July and then had watched the Prime Minister take credit for fixing it with a text message to the CEO of the Australian chamber of commerce has been rolled whichever way he likes to spin it. And now his cabinet colleagues are going on television to insist the two of them get along famously. For years I was a skipper with Bunbury Sea Rescue before going on to a career in shipping, and one of the first things you learn is that when the boat is taking on water the captain cannot be the last one to find out. Bad news needs to travel like lightning in any functional organisation. Yet it seems that the Albanese government, despite the Prime Minister's protestations of running a stable, cabinet centred government, is anything but a functional organisation. This saga gets worse when we consider that the Minister for Small Business has told the House of Representatives that she found out about the credit card ban on 1 October—'the same as everyone else'.

So the government had known since July, and the Treasurer knew after the Assistant Treasurer, but the small-business minister didn't find out until the same day as the public. It sounds all very orderly to me! We knew this didn't add up, so, when the shadow treasurer asked the Minister for Small Business—whose own Labor colleagues have been quoted in the press as saying, 'We've got a small-business minister who's got no idea about small business'—in question time whether the Reserve Bank had decided to ban credit card payments to the ATO, the minister answered with the Reserve Bank's ban on surcharges, as though they were the same thing. They are not. Banning surcharges on card transactions is very different to banning card transactions at all, and every small- and family business owner across Australia knows the difference, even if the small-business minister does not. That's what you get when you have a university academic in charge of the backbone of our country: small and family owned businesses. This is also the same minister who earlier this year suggested that the reason for small businesses going insolvent at record rates was because they were, and I quote, 'dodgy'. Fourteen-and-a-half-thousand businesses went under in 2025, the worst year since records began. And the small business minister's reason? Well, the owners must have been dodgy.

It's not only the opposition saying this minister and indeed the Albanese government don't understand small business; Labor's own backbench are now briefing Australian press, saying that there is nobody in cabinet who's got any business experience, which explains why the wheels are falling off. When the government's own side are saying it's bad, well, it must really be bad. We've got the member for Bennelong, the Labor backbencher who championed the surcharge ban in the days after it all turned to custard. But he's not dancing in tuxedos; he takes to Facebook to celebrate a cafe in Epping, cutting A coffee from $5.06 to $5. That 6c is massive cost-of-living relief for that particular customer! But it's 6c off already squeezed margins that might well be the difference between a thin profit and slowly going bankrupt for that cafe owner, who had the spine, the courage and the conviction to put it all on the line, perhaps risking their family home and their life savings to start a business in Australia, to employ people and to create something. If that's not what we want in this country—the same entrepreneurial spirit that's built our standard of living into what it is today—I don't know what is.

But the card surcharge ban is one decision. It follows the same pattern as the rest of Labor's approach to small business. When they run out of money, they simply come after yours. Labor's minimum 30 per cent tax on trusts is the clearest example. Treasury's own papers show that more than 200,000 small businesses across Australia will be forced to restructure. In Forrest, my own electorate, farming families, builders, family run shops—you name it—are the small and family owned businesses who use a trust, because it is the way that small businesses have been structured in Australia for decades.

When the Assistant Treasurer was asked whether some could pay more than 60 per cent tax, he wouldn't rule it out. How an effective tax rate of more than 60 per cent is in any way equitable or has a place in the Australian tax system is beyond belief. Just on Saturday I was speaking to a local man at the Brunswick Show who works in security, and he pleaded with me to come to Canberra this week to keep the government to account because our regional pubs and restaurants, like every other small business across Australia, are doing it tough. He told me that patronage is down, prices are up, and local businesses are losing the incentive to stay open. There are ever more for-lease signs cropping up through the streets of the towns of the south-west. It's not a future made in Australia. It's not the regional Australia that I grew up in. And it's certainly not the future that I want for our country.

So our answer starts with spending. We've got to get inflation down, because high inflation means high interest rates, which means more pressure on family budgets and more pressure on business budgets. And that's why we've announced $31 billion in savings across the four years from 2028-29, which will be the next election. That's $9.4 billion worth of climate bureaucracy gone, corporate welfare to the tune of $7.3 billion gone, $4.7 billion in the national housing schemes that haven't delivered any homes gone and an additional $7.9 billion in revenue by breaking open the black market for cigarettes. That's our plan to fix Australia.