Address to the New South Wales Business Chamber Lunch, Sydney
Posted on Thursday, 1 December 2011
E&OE……………………….…………………………………………………………………
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm welcome that you have given me. I want to congratulate the New South Wales Business Chamber on being a very strong voice for business in general but small business in particular. I think of all of the major business organisations right around our country, this has been the strongest. This has been the most articulate. This has been the least likely to bow to the kind of coercive pressure which is often put on representative bodies. I think of the national organisations the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has been the best and of the constituent organisations the New South Wales Business Chamber has been the best. So, I do believe that I am with the best of the best today and the highest compliment anyone can pay an organisation is to poach your staff. I don’t guarantee that I won’t come looking again because you’ve trained Paul Ritchie well and where we’ve got one good one, or two good ones, we can always go and get some more.
I also want to congratulate you and thank you for the strength of your campaign to support the Australian Building and Construction Commission. We all know that the ABCC has been the key factor in restoring the rule of law to a very great extent in the commercial construction industry. This is important for a whole host of reasons: first, because the decent, law-abiding people of our country ought to be able to go about their business without the threat of intimidation or thuggery and second, because it’s been responsible for boosting production and productivity in the commercial construction industry in the order of $5 billion a year. So, it’s been a very important economic reform, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and it must be kept. It must be kept and of all the business organisations in the country, you have been the strongest in supporting the ABCC.
Of all the business organisations in the country you have been the strongest in opposing the carbon tax. Now, all of us want to do the right thing by the environment. We are all conservationists now but we don’t help the environment by imposing a unilateral carbon tax which will raise the costs of Australian businesses without significantly reducing global emissions in the absence of comparable schemes overseas. You’ve had the good sense and the courage to recognise this and to fight against this and I hope that your example is catching because this should not be seen as a done deal because if it is seen as a done deal it will do permanent damage, permanent serious damage to our economy and permanent serious damage to the cost of living of Australia’s struggling families and households.
But all of you here really deserve a big pat on the back because you are all the representatives of small and medium business. As Stephen has said, small and medium business are the creative sector of our economy. I know that big business is important. I know that big business ought to succeed. It must succeed if Australia is to do well but big business, generally speaking, a bit like big government, tends to be set in its ways. It tends to be a lumbering and at times clumsy beast whereas small and medium business are the innovators, the creators, the flexible ones. You are responsible for 50 per cent-plus of private sector employment in this country. You’re responsible for more than 30 per cent of Australia’s GDP. You are the people who take risks, not on behalf of shareholders, you are the people who take risks yourselves because invariably what distinguishes a small business from another business is that the proprietor or the operator’s own house is on the line. So, if it goes wrong you don’t just lose your job, you can lose your house and as we know in some cases you can lose your family as well. So, the small business people of this country are the unsung heroes of our community. We know they’re not nurses, we know they’re not doctors, we know they’re not philanthropists in the same way that so many of our big business people are. They don’t get the kudos but by God they do the job and if we didn’t have them we would be an impoverished society in every sense of the word. So, I want to thank you for the risk you take, for the efforts you make and for the good you do.
No one can have work in this country unless he or she works for himself or herself or he or she is employed by someone else and nearly all of you are employers and I hope your workforce are grateful for what you do for them. Sure, it’s a two way street but the initiator in the employment relationship is the employer and without the employer there can be no employment and without employment the 10 million or so workers in our economy would not have their livelihood. So, I do hope that you appreciate how much you do for our country and certainly, as far as I’m concerned, I am always conscious of how much you do for our country.
Support for small business is in the DNA of the Liberal and National parties of Australia. We want to get government spending lower, not because economists tell us to – although they do – we want to get government spending lower because it means that taxes can be lower. We want to get government borrowing down because that means that interest rates can be lower and if taxes are lower and interest rates are lower, you have more opportunity to succeed and if you succeed we have a stronger economy and if we have a stronger economy we have a stronger and more cohesive society.
I would ask you to remember the good work that the Liberal and National parties did in government just a few years ago. I don’t want to make a highly partisan speech today but I think I can allow myself this reflection: that the longer the Rudd-Gillard Government lasts, the better the Howard-Costello Government looks. To many of you it must seem like a golden age which has now been lost and one of the reasons why it was a golden age was because we listened and we tried to be helpful. We didn’t always get it right. We made mistakes because we’re only human but we never made the fundamental mistake of thinking that an economy just happened, and thinking that business could endlessly be taxed and endlessly be regulated and endlessly taken for granted and when it comes to small business, we reduced the company tax rate, we halved the cost of incorporation and above all else we put in place the entrepreneur’s tax offset because we understood that so many small business is not incorporated and yet it deserves a break because of the good work that it’s done.
While I don’t claim to be the possessor of all wisdom and all understanding, while I don’t claim myself to be the perfect exemplar of every value that business would like to see in politicians, I do believe that we will be every bit as good a friend to small business next time we are in government as last time we were in government because 16 members of my shadow cabinet were ministers in the most small business friendly government this country has ever seen. We were the friends to small business in government before; we will be the friends to small business in government again. In fact, I’d like to think we would be even better friends in the future than we have been in the past because we have learnt from both the strengths and the weaknesses of the previous Coalition government.
Over the last 12 months we have made six significant announcements for small business. The first is that the Minister for Small Business will be a full member of the cabinet and the Minister for Small Business won’t be distracted by other responsibilities. He, and I think I can say he, because Bruce is in the room now, he will be responsible wholly and solely for small business because small business deserves the undivided attention of a cabinet minister. I want to thank Bruce for the extraordinary job he’s done as the Shadow Minister for Small Business and express the great confidence that he will be one of the really good reforming cabinet ministers for small business in the next Coalition government. Please give him a round of applause because shadow ministers in particular don’t always get the kudos that they deserve but anyway, Bruce, I know has been wearing out the shoe leather in every sense in his role and it’s fantastic to have him here today.
We will simplify the administration of compulsory employee superannuation contributions by allowing small business to remit those compulsory contributions to the ATO which would then have the responsibility of distributing those to superannuation funds.
We are going to move the administration of the national paid parental leave scheme from small business to the Government’s family assistance office.
We will end the current attacks on family businesses and the self employed by recognising contractors as a legitimate form of business and allowing them the freedom to engage and contribution to the economy without harassment.
We will strengthen support for small businesses impacted by natural disasters through the provision of concessional loans, not only for those directly affected but also for those consequentially affected by small business.
Above all else, we will rescind Labor’s carbon tax. This is, as I’ve said, a pledge in blood. We will rescind it. We will do whatever is necessary to rescind it and if we fail, we will deservedly not stay in office because oppositions that say one thing before an election to win votes and do the opposite afterwards to win government or stay in government, do not deserve the continued support of the people and if that’s true of oppositions, it’s even more true of governments and if there is one statement that will deservedly haunt the current Prime Minister to her political grave, it’s the statement she made five days before the last election, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”
But ladies and gentlemen, the commitments that we have made this year to small business come on top of earlier commitments that we have made to small business such as our campaign commitments from last year to extend unfair contract protections from consumers to small businesses, to appoint a small business ombudsman to act as a champion for small business inside government and above all else, to ensure that government pays your bills on time, not just for people who have formal contracts with government but people who have any dealings with government. If you are late paying your tax, the ATO charges you interest and if government is late paying you, you should be able to return the compliment.
But what I want to focus on today, ladies and gentlemen, is the red tape burden which every small business inevitably has to bear. I don’t say that we can ever entirely free you from the burden of regulation, from the duties of compliance. It is important that we have high occupational health and safety standards. It is important that people get paid their due. It is important that consumers are protected. But all of this has to be done in the most reasonable way possible. All of this should be done in ways that understand the reality of doing business in the world.
A recent study shows that 70 per cent of Australian businesses believe that the regulatory burden has become much heavier over the last three years and 75 per cent of Australian businesses believe that it will get even worse in the next three years. A Deloitte study suggests that fully four per cent of all business costs go on the compliance job of business. The Productivity Commission has recently estimated that red tape reduction could add $12 billion a year to Australia’s GDP.
Now, in my budget reply speech earlier this year I committed the Coalition to achieving a $1 billion a year reduction in the red tape compliance burdens of business and we intend to do that by replicating nationally a programme which has been working successfully for the last few years in Victoria. For example, by shifting to an online application and approval process for building developments, Victoria has not only cut paperwork and time but saved the Victorian economy $40 million a year in compliance and opportunity costs. The consolidation of environmental licensing to enable multiple licenses to be consolidated in to one license for corporate entities has produced a $3 million saving. Food safety standards are being streamlined through one licensing system has saved $2 million a year and reforms allowing second hand goods dealers to maintain electronic records instead of hard copies have saved, again, $2 million a year. These are examples of the kind of benefits to business which have been achieved in Victoria by their red tape reduction programme.
In Victoria every official body is required to quantify the costs of its regulations and its compliance requirements to business and it is required to deliver an annual target of reductions to business and the bonus payments of public servants are tied to them achieving these reductions and it has worked, ladies and gentlemen, it has worked. The Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry has described this programme as an example of meaningful progress in the battle against red tape. Well, ladies and gentlemen, what has worked in Victoria can work nationally and this is, I think, one of the really important pledges that we have made. It’s an earnest of our determination to act in good faith with small business in particular and it will be one of the big contributions that we can make to improving productivity across our economy.
Today I want to deepen our commitment to red tape reduction with an important further announcement. Most of you would be familiar with Arthur Sinodinos, a friend and now a parliamentary colleague who was the former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister John Howard. No one knows where the bureaucratic bodies are buried better than Arthur Sinodinos. No one knows how to keep government honest better than Arthur Sinodinos and as you know, for the last five years since leaving government, Arthur has been working in a senior position in business. So, this is a man who is capable of understanding the minimum requirements of government but the necessary requirements of business.
Arthur is going to lead a deregulation taskforce. He will be assisted by Kelly O’Dwyer and Senator David Bushby. They will be tasked with talking to the businesses of Australia to find example after example of intrusive and burdensome regulation, intrusive and unnecessary compliance costs. They will publish the best or the worst of these in a report to be released before the middle of next year and these will be exactly the kinds of benefits that we will give to small business in government to reduce unnecessary red tape, to reduce unnecessary compliance.
As I say, we don’t want to reduce the standards but we must and will reduce the cost of complying with standards because we know that people in business invariably want to do the right thing by their staff, by their customers and by their community. We know that. We understand that as you do and we are determined to make it easier for them to do so.
So, I do urge you, Stephen, to encourage your members to participate in this process which Arthur Sinodinos will lead. I think this has an enormous potential to improve the environment for the conduct of business in this country and to boost our national economic productivity.
We do have a plan for a stronger economy, for a stronger Australia. Yes, the first task of government, particularly in these times, is to live within its means but as well as restraining government expenditure it is vital that we do what we can to make our economy more productive. The lesson of the Eurozone crisis is that a terrible judgement is pronounced against those countries and those people which keep on taxing, keep on borrowing, keep on spending and, above all else, think that they can rest on their economic laurels. Well, we won’t rest on our economic laurels. Yes, the reforms of previous governments have been good for our country and good for our economy but for the last four years there has been a reform holiday in this country. Well, that is one holiday that we can’t afford to have.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honour and a pleasure to be here. I am so grateful that so many of you have come to listen to me today. I know that each and every one of you has staff waiting for you, has customers waiting for you after two o’clock. I don’t want to detain you any longer than is strictly necessary but the fact that so many of you have come today indicates to me that you know in your hearts that we can do so much better in this country. You know in your hearts that government is letting us down and by coming here today you want to encourage government to be the best that it can be. You want to say that Australia needs the better government that a great country deserves.
Thanks very much.
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