QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (15:04): I move: That the Senate take note of all answers to all questions without notice put by coalition senators today. What is disappointing about the responses we received to our questions today is that sincere questions were put to the government concerning the tax operations of Australian businesses, whether those were small businesses, those in the building sector or those in the farming sector, and what we found out from the government, in response to the concerns that have been raised by the stakeholders, is that the government did the political equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and saying: 'Yes, this is our policy.
We don't care who it impacts. It's going to be in place in 2028. It only impacts a small number of Australians.' But this is the sad part: the taxes that the Labor Party are putting on these businesses are taxes on enterprise, taxes on aspiration and taxes on growth.
Most Australians want to be their own boss. Most Australians want to run their own business. They want to decide when they get up and when they go to bed.
They don't want to be a company person. They don't want to have a boss shrieking at them or sending cranky emails to them at all hours. What Labor have proven through their budget—and what we've proven again through the answers that came in question time today—is that the Labor Party actually doesn't understand how businesses operate.
It's like a foreign language or a different country to them. You've got to remember that every single Labor senator in this place is essentially a former union official. In the United Kingdom, they've got the House of Lords.
Well, here in Australia, with the Labor Party, we've got the union barons' house, with all these union barons over there, and their sole focus in life is making sure that unions and the vested interests connected with the union industry in Australia are looked after, at the expense of everybody else—particularly at the expense of the business community. I'm not talking about big business; they can look after themselves.
I'm talking about small businesses. I'm talking about how they operate. These are the businesses that don't have a HR department or a compliance department, where it's just a mum and a dad—or maybe just one person, a sole trader.
These people are the lifeblood of the Australian economy. Where does your food come from? In Australia, we produce enough food to feed three times the Australian population.
That's because of the risks that farmers put on themselves every single day, whether there's rain or there's drought. That's what farming is about. It is a business.
And yet what the Labor Party have proven, through their answers to the questions put by coalition senators again today, is that they don't actually understand how farms operate. They don't understand the structure of farming in Australia. What we have also seen is that they don't understand how small businesses operate.
They don't understand that small businesses don't have an in-house legal department. So now small businesses are going to have to go to another small business and get legal advice on how to structure their affairs concerning trusts, because Labor have put a 30 per cent tax on trusts. Yet so many small businesses across Australia run their operations through trusts.
As to what Labor have done, through their budget, and despite the number of backflips since the budget—it is a war on small business; it is a war on farmers. This is very, very dangerous for Australia. Where did all the big businesses in Australia come from?
They came from small businesses at some point. We won't see business grow in Australia, and we will not see Australia grow, while this Labor Party continues its holy war against small businesses and aspiration. (Time expired)