Senator MURRAY (11:29 AM) —I am going to have to repeat all this when Senator Schacht comes back, because I do not think Senator Schacht has fully grasped the alternative amendment we have put forward, and it is relevant to this discussion. There are four aspects to the definitional process. The first is the proposition as to whether there should be a threshold. It is quite plain that the government have made the determination that there shall be a threshold, that small business shall be defined, and for what we think are good reasons, so we are likely to support the threshold argument. The second aspect relates to an ease of definition with which the community as a whole and the business community are content, and that is the definition which is the ABS definition. However, that is unnecessarily restrictive in this instance. The government have introduced a $1 million threshold, but the $1 million threshold, unless it is limited, may not cover not only service stations but all the hundreds of thousands of tenants who have made application to us as falling under neath that because over the 10-year span of a lease they could easily exceed $1 million.

That leads us to the question of making sure that the $1 million provision of goods and services should be further defined as 12 months, in other words, you have to receive in 12 months $1 million worth of goods and services supplied by a particular supplier. That can be in the form of rent, it can be in the form of fuel. There are many businesses with high turnovers and low margins which are small businesses which easily will receive $1 million worth of beer in a year or $1 million worth of fuel in a year, et cetera. So we cannot conduct the definitional argument without paying attention to the propositions put forward as I have outlined. The amalgam of amendments we have put together, namely, the ABS definition or the $1 million, whichever is the higher, but the $1 million has to be within a year, is the appropriate definition.