Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

As this is one of the last bills that I will see in the Senate, it is very important that I speak on it. One of the reasons I came to this chamber was to support small business, and the issues I spoke about in my maiden speech are in a minor way addressed in this bill. This is a generic amendment. It is a statement of the bleeding obvious—that we cannot have small restaurants having to produce two menus. It is excessive bureaucracy. We have to get out of the way of small business. A restaurant on the High Street should not have excessive costs put on them. We have to make sure we create flexibility for people in the restaurant industry.

We have to realise that the restaurant industry is a great employer of people. As has been alluded to by Senator Ryan—he might not have thought I was listening to him, but I was listening to him diligently from my office whilst lying on my couch—there are around 38,000 restaurants in Australia and they generate around $29 billion a year. Many restaurants are family businesses, and they are the epitome of what I believe in in small business. This allows families to grow up knowing their children. To me and many in the National Party, it is a social statement—the capacity to live and grow with your children. I suppose we are influenced by how we grew up. I grew up on a farm. I saw my mother and father all the time because the business we worked in was where we lived. This is something that should be available to many people.

Restaurants are a feature of small business. How often do you go into a small cafe and see mum and dad and one of the sons all working together. In Chinese restaurants you see the whole family pitching in and working together and knowing each other and growing up as a tight family unit. So the ethos of small business is intertwined with the ethos of the family. It is a crucial part of the dynamic of where I have sat philosophically, and it is probably why I sit on this side of the chamber.

A key part of that also is that we must make sure that we do not create a bureaucracy that makes small business impossible. I have seen this even in areas such as the insurance industry, where small operators keep being loaded down with regulation for regulation's sake. This is generally to the benefit of large providers, who can deal with the overheads of excessive regulation whereas a small businesses cannot. The occupational health and safety officer is a classic example. Large organisations such as the one I used to work for, ConAgra, can employ an occupational health and safety officer; they have the capacity to do that by reason of the size of their operation. But smaller feedlots cannot because they do not have the volume to be able to support that.

A lot of the regulatory burden is state laws. One of the most insidious laws that came into the farming sector was the tree-clearing guidelines. It determined that an asset that was owned by an individual would overnight be divested from that individual and invested in the state. Many of my own colleagues on the conservative side of the fence started making excuses for it—'it had to be right', 'the community is right to steal an asset from an individual'. But it is not the community's right to steal an asset from an individual. Excessive regulation steals an opportunity from the individual because it creates a mechanism whereby it is virtually impossible for the individual to progress through small business.

If we are going to get out of the current circumstances we are in financially, we have to rely on the economic powerhouse of small business. We can either be forced into this position down the track or we can move into this position of our own volition by genuinely going into the area and recognising that there is always a risk-return trade-off. But at the moment we are too risk averse and the return is that we are putting unnecessary pressures on small business that will in the future impede an economy that has had the benefit in the past of a mining boom that has generated great wealth in the economy. But that boom will taper off because all commodities are cyclical. That is not some sort of Cassandra-like principle; it is a statement of the obvious. As the commodity sector peels off, you are going to have to rely on other sectors of the economy to take up the burden of supplying the return to the nation to cover our bills, to cover our debt and to cover the social services that we in here demand every day in passing legislation. That return needs to match what we lose from areas such as the manufacturing industry.

If you are going to use the argument of GDP, we must start removing regulation from small business. I hope this is a statement of firsts. I fully support the root-and-branch review of the Competition and Consumer Act. That is going to be an absolute statement of our belief in small business, our core constituency. Where we go with that is a reflection of who we are as a political force.