Page 2212 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 June 1990
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involved in advising others on how to survive when most government actions that are taken work against their succeeding.
This indicates a principle that involves all of us in any area of life, and that is that what you reward you get and what you penalise usually you do not get. If we reward small businesses for doing well, their enterprise will be encouraged and they will do well. The result of that will be increased employment, increased productivity, and the thing that governments want more than anything else apart from power - more money. If we penalise the productive efforts of small businesses, if we penalise their enterprise, if we penalise the fact that they are prepared to work six and seven days a week, over a hundred hours a week, we will find there will be fewer small businesses, or smaller and smaller businesses.
One would think it would be obvious that there are only two ways that the ACT will survive economically. One is if the Assembly is abolished. I know that there is not a great deal of support for that idea in this Assembly. So that only leaves us with the other viewpoint, which is if we can get enough money to continue. That will not come successfully from the people of this community which is just a little larger than Blacktown in Sydney. Blacktown has 230,000 people; we have some 270,000. The money will only come from the small business area, and this Bill indeed acknowledges that. But the idea of killing the golden goose by grabbing what is said to be $1.8m and ensuring that businesses find it more difficult to survive in the long term is, I would suggest, not valid or logical.
What we should be doing in Canberra is acknowledging fully that we are not going to get out of this with our pants unless we support small business. We will lose our shirt as well. That is the only way we are going to get the money that is going to run Canberra, the showplace of the nation. It cannot be done via the number of people that live here. If we remove the penalties that prevent businesses from doing well, they will be encouraged to do better, and indeed will do better.
In the long time I have been involved in small businesses, I continually ask people in business whether they would like to hire more staff. I have never yet found a single individual - and I must have asked this question of hundreds of people - who said that he would not like to hire any more staff. Inevitably, people say they would like to hire more. Well, the next question is: "Why don't you?". The answer is that they cannot afford it. They cannot afford it because of payroll tax, because of restrictive penalties on hiring people, such as 17.5 per cent loadings and other things. There is a great penalty in running a business.
I was involved in Canberra in a business that was heavily oriented towards service. Well, when I say "heavily
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