Pop quiz: Can you name the small business minister?
Pop quiz: who is the current federal small business minister? Do you know without checking?
Since the end of last year, the small business sector has been out of the headlines thanks to a duchessing which turned into a decapitation.
In September, Alexi Boyd, then head of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) signed a memorandum of understanding with the head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The small businesses represented by COSBOA were none too impressed. Their industry-specific peak bodies were livid at the idea that they were being signed up to support multi-employer bargaining and a raft of measures floated at the Jobs and Skills Summit that would be impractical for small businesses to implement.
Boyd, it was said, had been “duchessed”. Former COSBOA head Peter Strong describes duchessing as treating a person “as a very special and worthy human being so that they feel obliged to a government (or opposition).”
It is common in politics, so it is not especially notable that the COSBOA head was offered a lift on the PM’s plane from the Business Council of Australia to the Jobs and Skills Summit the next day in Canberra. The question is not whether one is duchessed, but whether the duchess allows themselves to be reduced to decoration.
Under sustained pressure, Boyd resigned as head of COSBOA in January this year. The decapitation of the duchess left the small business sector headless. Silence has fallen upon the sector. It’s hard to speak without a head.
But the pain of small business is not diminished just because there’s no one to cry for them. All the cost of living pressures faced by individuals are shared by small businesses; in addition, many are struggling to find staff – the flip side of full employment – and staff wages are up. These points were raised with me by a number of industry bodies, but as a business owner, I can also personally confirm their experience.
In outer urban areas, finding accommodation for staff adds to the challenges. For businesses that deal in goods, supply chains are an issue. And then there’s the “mortgage cliff”, the steep increase in mortgage repayments that homeowners will face this year as fixed rates locked in over the last couple of years begin to expire. Small businesses which have used their home as collateral on a business loan will be hit with a double whammy.
Given that small businesses account for just under half of employment in Australia, the challenges facing the sector will have a big impact on the wider economy. If small businesses begin to fail, job losses will follow. And they’re feeling shaky.
In January, the MYOB Business Monitor found 52 per cent of SME respondents believed Australia would be in recession this year. The accounting software provider says it’s seeing small and medium-size businesses being more conservative with their own investment and spend. Xero, its competitor, says that “cash flow is also a pain point for small businesses, and late payments are a significant contributor to cash flow stress”.
Just because small business has a low profile, doesn’t mean nothing is happening behind the scenes. But not much is. Since you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you who the small business minister is. It’s Julie Collins, minister for housing, homelessness and (lastly) small business.
Collins told this column that “Small businesses are vital to Australia – not only do they employ millions of people and contribute more than $430 billion to our nation’s economy every year, they are also at the heart of their community.” She has been “spending months meeting with small business owners and organisations across the country since becoming small business minister”.
She and COSBOA chair Matthew Addison, who has acted as the organisation’s spokesperson since Boyd resigned, point to the minister’s speech at the recent COSBOA conference as evidence of the dialogue between the government and the sector.
But more cynical small business representatives say there was nothing new in the speech, talk isn’t action, and anyway, many of the measures the minister is taking credit for were initiatives the last government put in train. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry says that initiatives which could help small business with digital adoption and skills training are stuck in the Senate and could expire before they can pass.
Keen to step into the void, Coalition spokesperson for small business Sussan Ley has been on a listening tour around Australia. She says that “everywhere I have been from the inner suburbs of Sydney to the outer suburbs of Adelaide, to regional Queensland, families and small businesses are feeling real pain when it comes to cost of living”. And that “many business owners feel betrayed because Labor promised they would have cheaper power prices and that households would see a $275 drop in power bills.”
In fact, that’s one area they might get help. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has flagged help on power prices for individuals and small businesses in the upcoming budget. So, we know for sure that small business will be included in the budget papers, even if there’s not a lot else forthcoming.
There is one consolation the small business sector might take: it is not the big end of town. Big business has also been assiduously duchessed. It is inside the tent on many of the government’s big plans, from domestic violence leave to the Voice. And yet the rumblings out of Canberra are that they are about to be tapped for budget shortfalls.
It’s nice to be a duchess, right up to the point when your head rolls. It is a hallmark of the era of kinder, gentler politics, which starts out with grand gestures and often ends with the guillotine.
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Source: Thanks smh.com