ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT - PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS - SMALL BUSINESS
At the outset I will commend the mover of this motion, the member for Reid, for her work as a former doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney Business School—I'm pretty sure I've got that right—and her commitment to small business. She studied it and she wants it to be better. The difficulty is, she's on a side of parliament that hasn't always regarded small business as something that is as important as it should be, as important as it must be and as important as it can be.
The member for Solomon talked about the help that the government is giving businesses, via the budget, for power costs. It's like cutting someone's arm off then giving them a bandaid and saying, 'This will help.' It won't help. The person is obviously in far more pain than a bandaid can help. They need far more than just a bandaid. These are bandaid measures for businesses.
Mr Perrett interjecting—
Mr McCORMACK: I wasn't here at the time, Member for Moreton, but I certainly would've. Anyway, we'll move on. We know that 98 per cent of businesses in Australia are small to medium enterprises. I was once part of a small family owned business. I started and ran my own small business with a couple of partners, and that business was highly successful. It's tough out there.
We heard, prior to the election, the Prime Minister on nearly a hundred occasions talking about the power bill cuts for families and for small businesses, but they have not materialised. And why haven't those power bill cuts been enacted? Because they were never going to be. This government is about pushing power prices up, with its zealotry, with its philosophy, with its going down the renewables pathway too early, way too soon.
I heard the member for Monash talking about the difficulty in hiring people in his Victorian electorate. And it doesn't matter whether it's in his rural and regional centre, it doesn't matter where it is—right across this nation in many shop windows you are seeing signs that say 'work available, apply within'. There are so many job vacancies. Indeed, the Regional Australia Institute identifies 80,000 vacancies in the regions at the moment, vacancies which cannot be filled.
I was talking to Neville Jolliffe and his wife, Jodi, who run independent grocers at both Coolamon and Forest Hill. They can't find people for love nor money. They cannot find people to fill those vacancies. They're happy to pay what they need to. They're a great couple who very much look after their staff. But, for them, it's like everybody else—I could mention the meat-processing plants, I could mention farmers, I could mention any area of endeavour, both unskilled and skilled, within the Riverina: there are job vacancies which simply cannot be filled.
Labor don't have the answers. They don't. They produced a budget where they talked up a $20,000 instant asset write-off. It was unlimited under us. There was no limit on that instant asset write-off under us, and that policy came in at a time when things were difficult. The economy was facing a very bleak future under the global pandemic, under a very—
Mr Perrett interjecting—
Mr McCORMACK: Will you be quiet and just listen? Maybe you'll learn something, Member for Moreton. You might just learn something, potentially, about the truckie tax which your side of the parliament has put on truckies. Many of them are family owned operations. Not to mention Scott's, refrigerated transport operators, which used to deliver all of the groceries around the country—they have gone to the wall. They have gone to the wall on your watch. They have gone to the wall, and what does that do? That pushes up grocery prices, which are already being hit by everything else that this government has put on them: more red tape, more bureaucracy, more tax.
This is the Labor way. This is what Labor does when it gets into power. It says one thing before it gets into power and does completely another thing after it gets into power. They have two faces; they absolutely do. This is so difficult for our small-business people, who are running this country, who are the backbone of the economy, who are taking the risks and who are paying everything that they need to, and then some, to keep their business doors open. Sometimes they go home with less money than their actual workers. Labor wouldn't understand that because most of them haven't ever run a business. Most of them have never taken that risk, most of them have never taken up the opportunity to do so, but they come in here and lecture us.