QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator SHARMA (New South Wales) (15:12): If you're a small-business owner or operator in Australia, you are dealing with blow after blow from this Labor government. You're paying electricity prices that are higher than what you were promised. You are dealing with surging input costs because inflation is out of control.
You're paying more interest on your debt than you were when Labor came to office. Your wages bill is soaring because wages are no longer tied to productivity. You've got weak consumer demand because per capita GDP is not growing and Australia has had the highest fall in living standards in the developed world.
You've just found out that the Prime Minister is a new shareholder in your business. He's going to take anywhere between 23 and 47 per cent of your business at the exit. That's Anthony Albanese, the founder, the startup guy.
Now you're being told that the legitimate way that you structure—especially family owned—businesses through a discretionary trust or a family trust is going to be hit with a new tax as well. Small businesses are important for any number of reasons. They employ five million Australians and they account for almost one-third of our economy, but more importantly they are the source of innovation, entrepreneurship and dynamism in the Australian economy.
They're the vehicle through which people with a new idea, ambition or aspiration go about realising that, and we are all the richer culturally and materially for that. Do you want to know what parts of the economy are the most innovative and the most dynamic? They are the small-business parts of the economy.
What this tax does is threaten to put yet another hurdle in the pathway of anyone who's running a small business or anyone who has the dream of starting a small business. It's almost as if the government thinks small business shouldn't exist at all. According to the Treasury's own consultation paper, this new tax on trusts is going to increase compliance costs.
It's going to force business restructuring. It's going to create additional complexity. This is not an insignificant issue.
There are about 800,000 discretionary trusts in Australia. There are about 930,000 individuals who declared trust income or who received income from a discretionary trust in the last financial year. This is going to be a significant impost on them.
If you look at the estimates of figures, Treasury's own figures suggest there will be at least $1½ billion in compliance costs. That's just in compliance costs. CPA Australia expects that just the professional advice costs to deal with this are going to be between $2 billion and $2.8 billion.
Others cite figures of up to $13 billion in costs imposed on business to restructure their affairs, to seek advice and to deal with this change. What is this going to add to the economy? Is it going to make the economy more productive?
No. Is it going to encourage new investment in Australia? No, certainly not.
Is it going to unleash aspiration or ambition? No. Is it going to get our economy growing in any sense again?
No. It's not going to do any of that. All this is is an additional impost on a part of the economy that Labor has no sympathy for, no regard for and no understanding for.
Do you want to know why? It's because there is no-one in the cabinet with any small business experience and because there's a small business minister who 'knows nothing about small business'. I'm saying those words, but they're not mine.
They're from a Labor member of parliament talking to a journalist earlier this week saying that the reason Labor is getting its policies so badly wrong is that there's simply no-one in the Labor cabinet who knows anything about small business and that there's the small business minister who doesn't get it. If you don't believe me, just have a look at the answers to questions in the House of Representatives this week.
This is another blow to small business.