Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is again to the Prime Minister. This morning I visited a landscape supplier in Queanbeyan which provides road base, limestone, sand and granite to other businesses and currently employs 10 people. The workers there are concerned that the Prime Minister’s great big new tax on mining and all extractive industries that make a profit will damage the business, increase its costs and force them to pass higher prices on to customers. Will he apologise to Mr Murray Flakelar and the staff of his business for making their lives so much more difficult?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition again for his question on economics. It goes down to the economics of small business. I cannot comment on the individual circumstances of the firm he describes, but let me say this to the Leader of the Opposition about what has kept many Australian small businesses alive over the past 18 months. No. 1: we stimulated the Australian economy. No. 2: we kept more than 200,000 people in jobs who would otherwise have lost their jobs. No.3: we provided tax concessions for small business during the course of the global recession so that they could actually bring forward their capital acquisition in order to keep themselves afloat. The small business tax benefit which was delivered was a huge success for small businesses right across the country. I would be interested to know whether in fact the business in question made utilisation of that particular tax measure, which we used in the course of our response to the global financial crisis.

The Leader of the Opposition is bored by these sorts of facts. These facts go to what kept hundreds of thousands of people in work, tens of thousands of small businesses with their doors open. Instead, what he proposes is to pull the rug from stimulus, notwithstanding the fact that the global economic recovery is tenuous, and thereby place at risk and at jeopardy the future of the Australian economy. His only response to the company in question is to send them a big warning bell: whatever you do, do not go from being a small business to a medium business which might have a turnover of some $5 million, because then you would be up for another two per cent tax if the business is incorporated. That is what the Leader of the Opposition stands for. What we stand for is bringing down the taxes on Australian business. What he stands for is jacking up the taxes on Australian business. We stand for increasing the super for the workers employed in that particular industry. He stands for ripping that super away from those workers. He stands also for reintroducing Work Choices. This government has withdrawn Work Choices. He stands for increasing the job insecurity of workers by ensuring that he repeals the government’s current arrangements concerning unfair dismissal. He stands for job insecurity. He stands for cuts to jobs, cuts to education and cuts to health as well as the reintroduction of Work Choices, all of which would be of passing relevance to the workers in the firm which he just described.