Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (09:04): It's been just 11 hours since the House rose and my contribution was interrupted by the adjournment, but, in that ensuing time, we've had many businesses face the awkward decision as to whether in fact they will continue to operate or not. Australia's small businesses are shutting at a disturbing rate: 40,000 microbusinesses lost in four years as wages that they have to pay go up.

Admittedly, the workers are getting less bang for their buck, but tax reforms and calls for a three-day week just mount and small business is doing it so very tough. What I fear is that those opposite don't understand or appreciate the hardships of small business because in many cases they have not run one. They've run picket lines out in front of them and they've run them into the ground, but they haven't actually run a small business to save themselves, and they don't understand and appreciate the complexities facing the operators of those many, many small businesses.

I ran one for nearly a decade, with a couple of others, and it's tough. Often you take home less pay yourself than you are in fact paying your employees, your workers. As to workers, yes, we saw the independent commission this week give a wage rise to Australia's lowest paid workers—bearing in mind Australia has one of the highest minimum wages anywhere.

But I say to those workers: do not be fooled, because once you take away the power bills, the rent or mortgage costs, the grocery bills and the fuel costs, you're taking home less. We as a coalition—we as Nationals and Liberals—want people to keep more of what they earn because it's their money. The other side treat wages, superannuation and all of these things as though it is the government, the taxpayers, paying for it, when in actual fact it's the small-business owners and operators who are being slammed every day of the week.

The national economy has slowed to a crawl, and the budget has not helped. You've got people who are running businesses who are saying that this government is waging a war on work and on small business. We had the small-business minister even talk about those businesses which accepted money during COVID as if somehow they were dodgy.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released just this week show the economy grew by a weaker-than-expected 0.3 per cent in the March quarter amidst declining productivity. It was only on 27 June 2025 that the consultation process was opened on a productivity roundtable. Well, how did that go when we see that productivity in every shape, way and form is being smashed by this federal budget?

Then we had, of course, the Treasurer out there trying to explain it away and saying: 'Nothing to see here. All is well. All is good.

The economy is growing.' Well, we should be booming. Despite the worldwide headwinds, including the war in Iran, we should be, as a nation, booming, but we are being slowed by bad policies and by a bad government, and small businesses have had enough because they are copying it in the neck every day in every way. We have heard from people such as Mark McCrindle, a social demographer, who said small businesses were being confronted with a 'war on work, an attack on risk takers and a target on the back of the entrepreneur'.

Once we take away that entrepreneurial spirit, that yearning to get out there, follow your dream, take a spark of an idea and turn it into a small-business success story, we pull the rug from underneath the economy. Small business—make no mistake—runs the economy. Small business employs the majority of Australians.

This government believes in a big Public Service, although they're taking away 111 Department of Veterans' Affairs staff, which is reprehensible. They believe that, because there's a bigger public service, they're doing their job. A bigger government with more control over people is how this government operates, and it's wrongheaded.

It's absolutely wrongheaded. Now, Mr McCrindle had this to say: It is already a challenging environment for small and medium enterprise, and the ones doing it tough are the smallest businesses. There are 40,000 fewer of those micro businesses today than there were four years ago— 40,000 fewer!

Do we think that the government, that the Minister for Small Business, that the Treasurer, that the Prime Minister no less think to themselves when they're formulating a budget: 'What can we do to help small businesses? What can we do to ensure that that engine room of the economy can prosper, can thrive?' They can barely survive with the policies that have been put out under this cruel, mean spirited, wrongheaded budget.

What we've got here is Mr McCrindle adding: They are the ones— he's talking about microbusinesses— most impacted by these suite of changes, whether it's (capital gains tax) reform or minimum wage increases. Here's an interesting statistic just to dwell on: New insolvency data shows 281 small businesses shut their doors in the five days after the federal budget alone.

That's 281 people who may well now be forced to live on welfare, 281 people who've given up the dream of running their own business, 281 people potentially—probably more—who've lost that hope, who've lost that drive, who've lost that zeal, that energy, that desire to get out of bed in the morning and make this country a better one. Shame on the government for this budget.

It's an absolute disgrace. It should be very much looked at and reviewed.