Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (17:24): I thank the member for Casey for raising this very important issue about the record number of insolvencies we’re experiencing under the Albanese government, and I commend him on the compassion he showed in his speech. I remember ‘the recession we had to have’. The member for Kennedy might have been in the state parliament when that happened, in the early nineties. It was a very difficult time. I remember it because that’s when I learned what the word ‘insolvency’ meant, as I watched my father’s small business go through it. The member for Casey did a great job with this. When we talk about insolvency, we’re not talking about something that happens to some corporate entity, or some impersonal thing that takes place on sheets of paper. We are talking, particularly for small businesses, about families who suffer the brunt and don’t have the cash savings to ride through these sorts of times. When they get hit, they get hit hard.
For us, the car went, the house went and we moved to a different city. For me, that meant a different school, different friends and different football teams. For my dad, it was probably, if we’re honest, a big hit to his mental health. He moved from running a business to working as a labourer. For my mum, it meant having to move to Sydney to work. It had a tremendous impact on our family. We went from being a family that was watching my dad go off proudly to run his business, to suffering a huge hit. I certainly wasn’t alone. During that time, there were thousands of families across Australia who suffered that. That’s what insolvency means. Today we’re in a GDP per capita recession. We’ve been in that situation for five quarters now, and, sadly, what we’re seeing is, once again, a lot of kids learning what insolvency means.
Right across Australia and right across our economy, a record number of insolvencies are taking place, and it gives me no joy whatsoever to see Queensland leading that table. As we’re talking on this topic, what we’re talking about is another generation of young Australians looking at the impact it has on their families as these small family businesses go through these terrible times. There is no doubt that those small and medium businesses, those family run businesses, are looking around at the moment and asking themselves: ‘Are we better off under Labor? Are we better off since Labor came to government?’ Sadly, across the board, the answer is, ‘No, we’re not better off’.
I think about the IGA in Southtown in my electorate. They’ve experienced skyrocketing power bills. They’ve seen their bills go absolutely through the roof, to the point where John at Southtown is now paying twice what he was previously, despite having installed somewhere around $35,000 worth of energy-saving devices. We’ve got higher loan repayments as interest continues to push up and up. We’ve got increased staff costs, adding complexity around hiring. As they look ahead at the IR changes that are coming through as legislation, small businesses have absolutely no idea what they mean, because these are mum-and-dad operations that do not have a legal team who can sit there and trawl through 300 pages of legislation and understand what the impacts are going to be.
There are fewer apprentices and trainees coming through. Since Labor took office, Australia has 85,000 fewer apprentices and trainees—a loss of one in five. That’s across the board, and, sadly, we have near-impossible insurance premiums. Insurance rates are going through the roof. So, when these small and medium businesses look out and ask that question, ‘Are we better off under Labor?’ the answer they’re coming back with time and time again is no.
What’s important to point out is that we are not here by accident. We are not in this situation by accident, but rather by the deliberate design of a series of legislation that Labor has brought about that has made things worse for small businesses in our country. I could point to the price caps in the gas industry, which have done what price caps have done since they were first reported in 300 AD, by the way: they lead to lower supply and higher prices. They do this every time. This happens across the board every time, and it’s happening again in our sector. I could talk to the IR legislation that has been brought forward that will make things harder for small businesses. I could talk about the $315 billion of additional spending which is driving inflation. Then we turn to our Minister for Small Business, who has produced a grand total of one piece of legislation relevant to small business. We are here by design. We’re in a worse place. This is where Labor has taken us, and this is why small businesses are very upset.
