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Thursday, 13 October 2011
Page: 7320

Senator CORMANN (Western Australia) (11:39): Let us call this what it is. The Auditor-General Amendment Bill 2011 is about making small business pay for the incompetence and the mismanagement of this Labor government over the past four years. We have this bill because the Labor government made a complete mess of the pink batts arrangement. This government decided to send billions of dollars out into the Australian economy to get people to put pink batts into their roofs. It is a matter of historical record that we had fires, deaths and all sorts of issues. In this $2½ billion program, after the government had spent half they then had to spend the other half to fix up the mess.

Because this government stuffs up, because this government does not know how to administer a program and because this government does not know how to do its job, who has to carry the can? Who has to pay the price for it? Small business does. The truth of the matter is that there were inherent flaws in what the government did at the time. No amount of auditing, no amount of additional red tape and no amount of increased compliance burdens would have addressed those inherent flaws.

Senator Bishop is now the Chair of the Economics Legislation Committee, so let us have a conversation about economics. When you have a government that suddenly puts billions of dollars into the economy, saying, 'We want people to spend this money on putting pink batts into their roofs,' and all of a sudden you get all these people across Australia saying, 'I've got this free money and I know I have to spend it putting pink batts into my roof,' guess what happens? The level of supply available in the Australian economy cannot match the artificially increased demand for that particular product or service.

We have a government that incompetently decides to put billions of dollars into the economy to create an artificial demand that the market cannot supply. And what happens? Hundreds of thousands of cowboys come in and said: 'There's all this money going around. The government is throwing taxpayers' money around like confetti. I want a piece of that. I can do that. I might not have the expertise, I might not have the track record, I might not have the experience and I might not know what I'm doing. What I'm doing might be completely unprofessional and it might put lives at risk. It might put the lives of my workers at risk. But there's all this government money going around, and I want a piece of that cake. I'm going to put some of these pink batts into people's roofs, even though I haven't got what it takes to make it happen.'

Here we have a government that has just thrown billions of dollars into the economy, creating artificial demand that cannot be met from the supply available in the market. All these cowboys come in and provide very bad service, with all the consequences that have been well documented. Then, of course, the inevitable happens: the government, under appropriate political pressure, has to pull the pin on the program, because there is an understandable outcry across the Australian economy about its incompetence, which has put lives at risk and caused fires in houses around Australia. The government then has to do the inevitable: it has to pull the money out of the program.

What happens then? You have the established suppliers—the people who know what they are doing, the people who have a good, solid small business, the people who actually provide a service that is valued by people across Australia—all of a sudden being confronted with competition from all these cowboys who were attracted by the government's taxpayer funded honey pot. Then all of a sudden the government pulls out the money. So all of a sudden what happens in the markets? I hope that the chair of the economics committee—the government senator representing the Labor Party on the economics committee—reflects on what I am talking about here, because he knows that this is true. As soon as the government then says, 'Okay, we've got to take all of this money away now,' we now have all these suppliers and services out there—the cowboys as well as the established businesses—but now we have taken all of the demand out of the market. What happens? All of a sudden all of the Australian small businesses—the good businesses who were able to provide a service that was valued and who knew what they were doing, along with all of the cowboys—have not got any business anymore, because the whole market collapses. All of a sudden their businesses are under pressure. All of a sudden their businesses collapse alongside the cowboys.

No amount of additional red tape would have prevented that from happening. We wrote the script before the government went ahead with this—this Labor government, which does not understand the economy, does not know how to manage money, does not understand the consequences of its decisions, does not think things through and does not understand the impact that its decisions are having on real people. We have Senator Ludwig here, the minister who made an ill-thought-out decision out of nowhere to ban all exports of all live cattle—boom!—at the stroke of a pen, hurting thousands of Australian families. Of course, we get this again and again and again. This is a government which does not think things through. This is a government which does not understand the real-life consequences of its decisions. Then, once the shit hits the fan, rather than deal with the actual—

The CHAIRMAN: Order! Senator Cormann, I think you need to withdraw that remark.

Senator CORMANN: I withdraw that remark, but the Senate well understands what I am trying to say. Once the problems happen and once the government is confronted with the consequences of its actions, rather than address the root causes it wants to put another red-tape bandaid on it. Rather than deal with the root causes, which are bad decision making in the first place, it wants to put a red-tape bandaid on it, which yet again will hurt small business.

The Senate should not go along with that. The Senate should force this government to face up to the consequences of its bad decisions. The decision to put billions of dollars into the Australian marketplace to solicit an artificial demand for additional pink batts was a bad decision, and it was always going to end up in tears. It was ending up in tears not because of what established, respected small businesses across Australia were doing but because what the government did was fundamentally flawed. It was inherently flawed. It was always going to be a problem.

So that is why the coalition will not be party to attempts to force businesses across Australia to pay the price for this government's incompetence and mismanagement. What we need is better government, not more red tape. We need a government that actually thinks things through before it presses ahead and sends billions of dollars into the economy, creating all sorts of consequences which were entirely foreseeable and which this government should have foreseen. That is really at the crux of this issue. Instead of doing the right thing and focusing on how it can deliver better government, it says: 'Oh, well, it's not really our fault. It's not our fault that all these cowboys were attracted into the pink batts market because we decided to put billions of dollars into the economy, creating a demand which existing small businesses would not be able to handle. It's not our fault that all these cowboys that came into the market then did not do the right thing. We now want to punish every single small business across Australia as a consequence of our incompetence and mismanagement.' That is not the way to go about this, I would suggest to the Senate.

Of course, this is not an isolated example. The pink batts example is one of the high-profile ones. Of course, we had the Julia Gillard memorial halls, and that was another high-profile fiasco. But the principle here is that when governments, and in particular Labor governments, wilfully spread taxpayers' money around like confetti instead of doing what they should be doing—that is, to prudently and cautiously assess in terms of allocating limited taxpayer resources to the priority needs and services that should be provided to the Australian community—this is what you are going to get. It is completely inefficient that this government says, 'Rather than be more cautious in the way we spend taxpayers' dollars and focus on how we can deliver more with less and on how we can fund the necessary services of government instead of going into areas where we should not go, let's just increase the size of government and the level of red tape and make it harder for small and mid-sized businesses to contract with the government.' That is not the way to do it.

The live cattle export fiasco, which was the responsibility of Senator Ludwig, who is sitting here in this chamber, is another one of these examples where you have a government that is completely oblivious and, quite frankly, does not care about the impact that its bad and incompetent decisions are having on real families and real people. So I guess the next thing is that we are going to have some sort of red-tape solution to prevent governments from making these sorts of decisions in the future, instead of just doing what we should do, which is to change the government so that we have a government that actually knows what it is doing. Our position is very clear: although we do not wholeheartedly support the bill, the amendments circulated by Senator Ryan at least allow us to be in a position to not oppose it. Unless the Senate supports the amendments put forward by Senator Ryan, the legislation will be an irresponsible attack on small- and mid-sized businesses across Australia. It will inappropriately increase the level of red tape imposed on small- and mid-sized businesses just to cover up the demonstrated incompetence of this Labor administration over the last four years. We remember when they came out with another proposal to spend a lot of money, they thought, 'We can't trust finance minister Penny Wong with that; we'd better appoint former coalition finance minister John Fahey to oversee how the money is spent.'

The government know they are not good at dealing with money, so they are always looking for a workaround. The problem is that this workaround is going to increase the cost of doing business with government in Australia. That might be good for big business, and we know that Senator Bishop and the Labor Party more generally are very comfortable in the company of big business and that they do not really like small business. Big businesses are a bit like governments sometimes—they have their bureaucracies and they can talk the same language to each other. Big businesses have big departments, whose job is to deal with government bureaucracy. Big government likes big business because they talk the same language. Small business is not able to handle a lot of the red tape coming out of this government. This legislation is another example of unnecessary red tape. What we need in Australia is a serious commitment to rolling back the red tape, reducing the red tape, and not keeping on adding to it. If Senator Bishop and other Labor senators spent a bit of time in their home states talking to small business, they would know what I am talking about. Get out of the boardrooms of the big business corporations, who are quite happy to deal with that sort of stuff, and start talking to real people.

Senator Mark Bishop interjecting—

Senator CORMANN: Start talking to some real people across Western Australia, Senator Bishop, because that is what senators on this side of the chamber do. If you were talking to some real people, you would not be supporting this legislation This legislation is all about making business pay the price for Labor's incompetence and mismanagement over the last four years.