Shadow Portfolio — 5 June 2026

Michael McCormack (National Party) made his first parliamentary contributions of the week on 5 June, speaking across two House debates with a common thread: government policy is damaging small and independent operators while failing to capture revenue it was counting on.

In the Tax Reform No. 1 Bill debate, McCormack put a specific number to small-business attrition, arguing 40,000 micro-businesses have closed over four years under rising wage costs and budget measures, and that ABS data recorded 281 small-business closures within five days of the federal budget announcement alone. He directly contested the Treasurer's framing that the economy is growing, using the closure figures as a rebuttal.

His characterisation of the budget as a direct attack on what he called the "engine room of the economy" signals the opposition's intent to keep small-business survival as a standing line of attack against the government's economic narrative through this bill's passage.

The illicit tobacco debate gave McCormack a second, distinct angle on the same underlying argument — that government policy is generating unintended economic harms. He told the House that up to four in five cigarettes smoked in Australia are now illegal [TA-260604-house-97eb5e75391c:s044], a figure he called a disgrace. The fiscal dimension is substantial: the government projected $27.3 billion in tobacco excise revenue over 2025–26 to 2029–30 but now forecasts only $15.4 billion, an $11.9 billion shortfall McCormack argued should be funding hospitals and public services.

ABS experimental wastewater testing data, cited via a Sydney Morning Herald report, underpins the scale of the shift — illicit nicotine products accounted for 80 percent of nicotine consumption in 2025, up from just 12 percent in 2017, while overall nicotine use rose 40 percent over the same period [TA-260604-house-97eb5e75391c:s088]. McCormack extended the argument beyond lost revenue to organised crime, pointing to highway patrol seizures connecting the black market to bikie gangs, and to harm to low-income smokers and small tobacconists — reinforcing the small-business framing consistent with his earlier contribution.

Governments across all jurisdictions are now spending more than $300 million annually to combat the illicit trade, a cost he presented as a further indictment of the policy settings that created the market.

Taken together, today's contributions reflect a coordinated opposition line: government tax and budget settings are both destroying legitimate small businesses and driving consumers into illegal markets, with the fiscal cost falling on ordinary Australians. Both attacks converge on the Treasurer's economic management record.