Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the importance of small business to my electorate and to the Australian economy in terms of both our economic performance and also job opportunities for young Australians and for Australians of every ilk. It is true to say that at the moment survey after survey is telling us that small business in Australia is finding the conditions very difficult to manage. We saw yesterday the Dun and Bradstreet national business expectations hit a two-year low. We have seen the Westpac consumer sentiment index show another soft result. We have seen the ACCI survey on investor confidence decline in terms of business confidence. We have also seen in the Sensis business index that small business had a massive drop in their confidence, falling from 44 per cent to 28 per cent, the second biggest drop in the 18-year history of the index.

It is not hard to work out why small business lacks confidence in a government that spends too much money and is not able to make the tough decisions about its own spending, which puts more pressure on small businesses and the ability of their owners to run them. It is a fundamentally important part of our economy that the Labor Party do not appreciate and have never appreciated. They are interested in big employer organisations, big industry associations and big unions. That is what Labor have always stood for. They have never been interested in the forgotten people in our economy, the heartbeat of the economy who provide 48 per cent of private sector employment. There are some 731,000 small businesses in Australia employing from one to 20 people. There are over one million small businesses defined as not employing people. That means that there are nearly two million in total. In Mayo alone, there are over 4,000 employing between one and 20 people and 8,500 defined as non-employing. That is 12,000 in total.

Small businesses are a fundamental part of our economy that the Labor Party are completely abandoning. Worse than that, they are putting more pressure on them. Before the 2007 election there was this grand promise of one regulation in for one regulation out. What we have seen from the Labor Party in this area is some 12,835 new regulations with a reduction of only 58. This is not one in, one out—far from it. It is a concerted attack on the heartbeat of our economy. It is an area for which we must stand up. We must represent our constituency in this respect. We have to take the pressure off small business. They are the great entrepreneurs in our economy; they are the great employment growth centre of our economy. At the moment, they are under significant pressure. It is the responsibility of our side of politics to hold his government to account and to outline how we would manage that part of the economy far better than the Labor Party.