James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) | Hansard source

This bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2024, is a disgrace, ladies and gentlemen. This is an attack on every small business in Australia, if you run a small business, if you work in a small business, if you buy from a small business, if you walk past a small business—shame on you, because you should go into the small business and buy off them! This bill, notwithstanding the fancy title, the nice big words and all the acronyms, is an attack on every small business in Australia, and this government should be ashamed of itself for the war that it has declared upon small business.

Why is small business important? It employs millions of Australians. Why is small business important? From every small business comes a medium business and a large business. From every small business comes the tax revenue that is so important for the public services that help make this country a great place but also for ensuring that Australians have the quality of life that we should have in such a rich country. But we have a Labor Party in power who have never seen a business that they don't want to tax into the ground, which is what this bill effectively is about. It is a de facto tax on every small business in Australia. It is a full-on attack on every small business in Australia.

COSBOA, one of the great representative bodies of small business, have expressly noted the Attorney-General's failure to follow best practice and said that the bill 'leaves the door open to cost confusion and compliance headaches for small businesses'. Why is that important? If you run a small business, if you own a small business, guess what—you're the director of finance, you're the director of HR, you're the director of maintenance, you're the director of operations and you're the director of governance, because it's just you running that small business. There is no bureaucracy of people, as you see in large businesses and in the public sector, to help you run your business.

When the Rhodes scholars who sit around the cabinet table of this country—those Mensa society members that are the Labor Party—come up with ideas like this, they fail to understand how small businesses operate. They have no experience in small business because they've come from the unions. In the UK there is the House of Lords, but here in Australia we've got the 'House of Union Barons' because every single Labor senator—

Thank you for laughing at that one, Senator Gallagher; I've used it before, but it's a good one and an old one!

They're all union officials, so they don't understand what makes small businesses run. Guess what makes small businesses run? It's the 'a' word—'aspiration'. It's the 'd' word—'dream'. It is the dream that that little business that you have, whether it's a cleaning business, a corner shop or a place that cuts keys, is your income and your world, and that that is how you can feed your family, pay your bills and get on with life. And one day you might be able to open up another branch of your business. Maybe one day you can get a bigger shop, maybe one day you can employ someone else and maybe one day you can grow your business so it earns more money—not because you want to go and live on a superyacht in the Mediterranean but because you want a quality of life that comes with living in Australia. That's what small business does for Australians. That's why it's the dream of so many Australians. And that's why this bill is a nightmare for small businesses. That's why this bill has the unintended consequence of once again making small-business life tough for those people who want to own a business, run a business or use such a business.

The Real Estate Institute of Australia has referred to experiences in New Zealand where real estate agents over there have been slugged with additional costs between $30,000 and $60,000 in exchange for an unquantified public benefit. These aren't just numbers someone has tapped into a calculator or put into their iPad; this is real money. This is going to hurt small businesses, it's going to hurt the owners of small businesses and it's going to hurt Australians. For the life of me, I do not understand why any political party or any political movement or particularly any government wishes to make it tougher for those Australians who run small businesses. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland, in my home state, has significant concerns that the legislation is too complex, poses a disproportionate burden on real estate agents and adds to the transactional costs of buying a house.

We've got a weird form of Santa Claus here at the moment. We've got a semi-retired Prime Minister who is heading off to his nice retirement home. He thinks he's Santa Claus because he'll get all these bills rushed through the Senate today. The Labor Party are a lot like those uni students who leave all their work till the last day and do an all-nighter. They will rush all these bills through, and we're going to have the unintended consequences of the costs to small businesses and also the red tape. We're going to have a weird form of the Labor Party—think of Prime Minister Albanese as Santa Claus, flying around Australia with reindeer, but instead of sprinkling presents he's sprinkling red tape everywhere on small businesses, red tape that is going to suffocate small businesses because of the burden it puts on them.

I refer to my earlier comments. A small-business owner is the director of operations, the director of governance, the director of finance, the director of taking out the rubbish in the mornings—they do everything. They open the door up, they close the door up and when they get home they then do more work. Who is going to have to deal with this? It is the small-business owners. Guess what? They've got enough on their hands at the moment. They've got a cost-of-living crisis. Have you seen how much power costs? I was crying before because Simon Birmingham is leaving the building. I sort of told a fib; I cried two weeks ago because of my power bill. If you don't cry when you get your power bill, you are not a human being. Quite frankly, they are just exorbitant at the moment because of this Labor government and what they're doing. They've got these poor small-business owners who are trying to earn a buck, trying to employ people, trying to live the great Australian dream, and we've got the Christmas grinches coming along trying to take it all away from them. The Law Council of Australia has noted:

The legal profession is already the most extensively regulated profession in Australia, and dual regulation of legal services remains an ongoing issue for the legal profession, not least because increases in regulatory costs inevitably put upward pressure on the cost of legal services.

I would file that quote under what bears get up to in forests and the religion of the bishop of Rome because, quite frankly, Sherlock, of course costs are going to go up when governments put more burdens on small businesses. What are these small businesses going to do? Are they going to be like a charity and say: 'I'll take on the burden of these costs. It means I won't have as much money to pay for my bills and for the mortgages.' Remember, interest rates have gone up 12 times since the Labor Party came to power. Insurance has gone up, I think, by 16 per cent since the Labor Party came to power. What they will have to do—they don't want to do this—is pass their costs on to the consumers. It is Australians who are going to lose out because of this piece of legislation. It is going to cost more for Australians.

In question time over the past few weeks it has become clear that the secretary of the Labor Party has briefed the Labor cabinet that there's cost-of-living crisis out there and they should do something about it. So we're hearing the words 'cost of living', 'cost of living', 'cost of living'. It's almost like one of those country auctions in terms of how many times 'cost of living' has been said. But this is going to make it worse. We've got the words of the Labor ministers saying, 'We're going to do something about the cost of living; it's terrible,' because the secretary of the Labor Party has briefed them on that, yet we have a bill before us in this chamber which is actually going to increase the cost of living for Australians. Merry Christmas, Australia! This is what you're getting from this Labor government. It's not the 12 days of Christmas; it's the 31 bills rammed through this Senate chamber a month before Christmas. This is the disrespect that the Labor government and their friends in the Greens have for the Australian people. I've said this before: friends do not let their friends vote for the Greens, and friends do not let their enemies preference the Greens, because you end up with legislation like this.

You may be thinking: 'This bill, with this very nice title, sounds like an eminently sensible bill, Senator McGrath. Why are you opposed to it?' Well, I'm opposed to it because of the red tape and the costs to small business. If you think this bad, you'll find this is just a foretaste of things to come should Labor and the Greens win the next election. This bill is an amuse-bouche. Is that the correct pronunciation, Senator Hughes, for when you go to fancy restaurants and they give you nice little bits of food—an amuse-bouche? This is what this bill is. It's not even the entree. It is an amuse-bouche in terms of what is coming towards Australians at the moment. It's just a little taster, and it is a bad taster. It is a gagger in terms of how bad the taste of this bill is going to be for the small-business owners across the country.

Next week I'm going to be travelling around Queensland, as is my wont. What the people of Queensland are going to be asking is: 'Why would the Senate do something like this? Why would the Labor Party do something like this?' I'm going to say to them, in all my coffee catch-ups and all the pubs I go to: 'It's because we've got a Labor government who do not understand what actually drives the economy. We've got a Labor government who are so detached from reality that it's not the Canberra bubble but 'Canberraworld' that they're in. It's a bad TV series. It's something that you might see on Netflix that was produced by a uni student or something like that. This is how bad this government is—Canberraworld. The mob in Queensland, the people who voted for David Crisafulli on 26 October in that landslide win, are going to say: 'What? We've got a government who are going to put more red tape on small business? We've got a government who are going to make small businesses hurt financially? This is some type of joke.' But the sad thing is that this is not a joke.

It is sad what this bill means for small businesses across Australia. It is sad—the other legislation that is being rammed through this parliament because of the preference deal between Labor and the Greens; the impact that it's going to have on small businesses. On this side of the chamber, we will always stand for the small businesses in Australia. We will always stand for those who work in small businesses, whether they're employees or those who run the businesses or whether they're shareholders of the family trusts or whatever it is, because this is going to hurt small business. When small business hurts, that means Australia hurts. When Australia hurts, that means that's just not a good place to be, because government is supposed to help Australians. It's not supposed to punish Australians. This bill, as Senator Cash has pointed out, punishes hardworking Australians. It punishes small businesses. So, regardless of all the nice language in the bill and all the other things that are in the bill, when it is distilled down to the essence, it is a bad bill because it hurts small business.

What we need to see in Australia is a government and a political movement, something that you see with the Liberal-National party coalition, that understands that bills like this are bad for small business. In fact, what we should be doing is bringing in bills to help small business, not hurt small business, not hinder small business, not punish people who want to get on with their lives. A rich small-business environment means more taxation revenue. More taxation revenue means we can help pay down Labor's billion-billion-billion-dollar debt that they've given to the Australian people. It's going to be a trillion-dollar debt under the Labor Party—a trillion dollars worth of debt under the Labor Party. We've got the Guinness book of records over there in terms of the debt they are giving to the Australian people. It's a trillion dollars. It's enough to make Santa Claus blush, and we know that he's not the type of fellow to blush. So I wish everybody a Merry Christmas. Vote down this bill. (Time expired)