The opposition has been going particularly hard on Labor’s credentials with small business, hoping to portray the government as out-of-touch technocrats with no sense of what the “real Australia” goes through.
Small Business Minister Anne Aly was singled out for particular attention last week, including Moncrieff MP Angie Bell’s charming contention — later withdrawn — that Aly and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ought to be “absolutely shamed and stoned in the square” over the ATO’s decision to ban credit card payments, which she argues will badly affect small businesses.
Running parallel with this was the accusation that the government can’t legislate effectively for the small business sector because its MPs lack any background in it.
“Too many people in this government have never run a business,” One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson told the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 1267084
“They’ve never put their own savings on the line. Never laid awake wondering if there’d be enough money in their account to make the week’s payroll.”
Independent. Irreverent. In your inbox
Get the headlines they don’t want you to read. Sign up to Crikey’s free newsletters for fearless reporting, sharp analysis, and a touch of chaos.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
The appeal of slating the government’s lack of small business expertise is obvious: it implies a lack of relevant experience managing budgets, and gives the impression of managerial time-servers, out of touch with common concerns.
Hanson, of course, ran a fish and chip shop before politics. She sold it in 1997, when less than 10% of Australians who owned a home computer accessed the internet, the father of the house was Ian Sinclair (who had been a minister under Robert Menzies), and The New York Times published its first front page with a colour picture. For the 30 years since then she’s been a professional political candidate and media figure, but at least she has actually run a small business — so Hanson passes muster here.
But can the same be said for the opposition? Using Crikey’s highly respected and entirely made-up Dagwood Dog Scale of Small Business Credibility, we can inspect just how much of a stretch it is for the Coalition to be talking this way about Labor MPs’ lack of real-world experience.
What’s a small business?
“I make no bones about the fact that before politics, I turned around industries, I turned around businesses,” Opposition leader Angus Taylor told reporters in Canberra last week, a line he returned to on Instagram.
Taylor comes from a wealthy, powerful farming family and after a string of impeccable private schools and a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he worked for the giant, secretive consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Hanson may have had all this in mind when she told CPAC that while Australians “despise” Albanese, they were not interested in a “smarmy management consultant” either.
“The Albanese Labor government doesn’t understand small business,” says Julian Leeser. Leeser started as a political staffer in 2001, advising then-workplace relations minister Tony Abbott, followed by a stint with then-attorney-general Philip Ruddock. Leeser also worked as a solicitor and was executive director for conservative think tank the Menzies Research Centre, before becoming director of government policy and strategy at the Australian Catholic University in 2012.
Senator Andrew Bragg called out Labor’s “war” on small business. Before entering parliament, Bragg worked for consultants Ernst & Young, and held senior positions at lobbyists the Financial Services Council and the Business Council of Australia.
WA Senator Michaelia Cash marvelled at the Albanese government’s depths of ignorance as to how a small business is run. Prior to her political career, Cash was a solicitor with the law firm Freehills and famously illustrated her understanding of what it’s like to struggle by recounting her time on holiday when she was young.
“Too many small business owners are asking why this government seems determined to make their survival harder,” shadow treasurer Tim Wilson told parliament. Wilson worked at the conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs from 2007 to 2013, after which he was appointed as an Australian Human Rights Commissioner.
“There is nobody in Labor’s cabinet with any small business experience,” Senator Dave Sharma sighs. “And it shows.” Sharma was, in his own description, a career diplomat. He was also on the board of the Israeli tech company Shekel Brainweigh. Does that count as small business experience?
Knows what an ABN is
Angie Bell’s biography page on the Liberal Party website does not record her running any small businesses, but notes that she “was a small business development specialist” and “worked in every Australian state and territory as a workplace trainer and assessor and retail consultant for leading brands”. So that’s something. Plus, she’s been a musician, as demonstrated by the legitimately dynamite saxophone solo she played when she and Nationals Senator Sam Birrell marked one of the Coalition’s recent dissolutions with an INXS cover.
“Small businesses are being crushed by Labor,” posted Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Apart from her profile as a domestic violence campaigner and Alice Springs town councillor, Price is a former children’s television presenter and singer-songwriter, so she’s at least been self-employed.
Okay, there’s dirt under those nails
A couple of Coalition MPs absolutely do have some history of small business ownership.
Nationals MP Jamie Chaffey reported in August that after more than three decades in his family farm machinery manufacturing business, he and his wife “have now handed it on to our children”.
Liberal Senator Anne Ruston became a business owner with her husband Richard Fewster in 2003, taking over long-time family business Ruston’s Roses.
And independent MP and whistleblower advocate Andrew Wilkie was previously known to Hobart shoppers as the former co-owner of a Persian rug shop in the Tasmanian capital.
Of course, the proportion of MPs from all parties who’ve done anything so quotidian as run a small business, or any other kind of normal job, is vanishingly small. As Mungo MacCallum presciently wrote as long ago as 2007:
“The age of the gifted amateurs, men and woman who would take temporary leave from their careers for a period of public service while preserving a real job to return to, is gone forever”.