Interview with Laura Jayes, AM Agenda

5 February 2025

LAURA JAYES: Bring in the Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume. Jane, thanks so much for your time. So how much does this policy actually cost? Have you costed it? And have you released those costings?

JANE HUME: Laura, it has been costed. It's been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, which is how the opposition always costs policies. We will release those costings, as oppositions have done in the past, Labor and Liberal. We will release those costings prior to the election, so that everyone can see them. But what we've seen here is an egregious politicisation of the Public Service and Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy has backed away from the government here and made it very clear that yesterday, at the press conference where Jim Chalmers made up these figures, he was lying. He said that Treasury had costed Coalition policy, but he doesn't know what Coalition policy is. These numbers are a nonsense, an absolute nonsense. The Small Business Tax Relief is a modest proposal to help small businesses retain their staff, reward their staff when somebody retires, when somebody goes on maternity leave after a hard week's work, or a successful project, and help those small businesses in hospitality at the same time that are doing it so tough under Labor. 1300 hospitality businesses have gone under in the last six months alone, they are crying out for help. This is a win-win for small businesses and for hospitality and clearly, Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese, have never had a job in small business. They've never run a small business. It's becoming increasingly clear that their distain for small business is being played out writ large with this ridiculous politicisation of the public sector and of a policy that every, that has been welcomed, welcomed by the sector that needs the relief.

LAURA JAYES: Do you really think businesses at the moment are paying fringe benefits tax on lunches anyway?

JANE HUME: Well, only 52% of small businesses out there are even turning a profit at the moment. This is a small and modest proposal to help those that want to take a potential client out to lunch. They're doing it now, but they're reaching into their own pocket to do it. This will help them build their businesses and it helps them reward and retain staff, bring them back to the office after working from home, making sure that after they've had a successful and productive week, let's remember that it's the private sector where productivity gains are being made here, not the public sector. After they've had a productive week, take them out to the pub, buy them a chicken schnitzel. It's not that complicated. It's very modest, and it's successful. It's helpful for small business and it's helpful for the hospitality sector.

LAURA JAYES: Should there be a quid pro quo here? Come back to work and you get a lunch? I mean, for still working from home, that would be the most productive thing you could do, right? And it wouldn't cost too much.

JANE HUME: I can't imagine that if you're working from home, you're going to be going out to lunch. So this is all about making sure that your staff are looked after, and if somebody is, I was in a newsagent, for instance, in South Australia last week, and there was a fellow there that was retiring after 17 years, and I was talking to that newsagent about this policy, and they said, that's fantastic, so we can go out to lunch today and tax deduct? I said, well, no, unfortunately you can't, because you don't have a Coalition government, you have a Labor government, and they don't understand small business and never worked in small business, and they don't support small businesses.

LAURA JAYES: I mean, this is small fry, as you say. It is modest and I think, you know, a lot of small businesses go, okay, yeah, that's pretty good. But where is the tax reform from your side of politics? That's what people really want. Please don't tell us that this is the extent of what the Coalition is going to take to the election.

JANE HUME: Well, we've already announced that we will increase the instant asset write-off to $30,000 and not make it (interrupted).

LAURA JAYES: That's not, that’s not full scale tax reform is it? Is that still one of the core principles of the Coalition to get this done? Because a lot of businesses are looking at this government at the moment and thinking they're not exactly pro-business and they're looking to you.

JANE HUME: Well, not only are they not pro-business, but you know, I read today they've released a small business policy paper which has three pages of glossy photographs, some of which are not even Australian businesses. They're taken in the U.S. So you can imagine, I would understand the distain that, or the feeling of being ignored, that small businesses in Australia have right now for this Labor Government, who clearly don't understand what it's like to have to worry at night about how you're going to make your payroll, worry at night about decisions to grow your company or contain it, just to try and get through this cost of doing business crisis that Labor's decisions have caused. But of course, we need to make sure that we focus on small business cutting red tape and regulation is half the battle won. These small businesses don't have their own compliance departments. They don't have in-house legal counsel. Some of them don't even have human resources, and yet, we know that they are being overburdened by particularly some of the industrial relations changes that this government has made. So that is an easy, low hanging fruit win to help small businesses, and we've committed to doing that, bringing back the definition of a casual, so that we have flexibility in our workplaces, particularly for small businesses. We also need to make sure that they have lower and simpler fairer taxes and the instant asset write-off, increasing the value of the instant assets write-off to $30,000 and making it a permanent feature of the tax system, rather than a one off incentive, that's going to help small businesses invest in their productive capacity. There's more that can be done. There's more that will be announced. We're not even hitting the election, the election campaign yet. This is one small component of the Coalition's policy to support small businesses. The backbone of the Australian economy, employ 5 million Australians. That's who we stand with.

LAURA JAYES: Okay, I don't expect to know the announcements right now. As you say, we are not in a campaign. But yes or no, is the Coalition going to try and undertake tax reform? Reform that we haven’t seen in decades.

JANE HUME: Laura, you will always find the Coalition is the party of lower and simpler and fairer taxes (interrupted).

LAURA JAYES (INTERRUPTS): But the question is whether you tinker, or you do something that actually matters?

JANE HUME: Yes, I know where you're going on this, Laura, I'm not going to be announcing policy on your show this morning. That will come as no surprise. But what I will say is the Coalition will always back small business, whereas the Labor Government will always back sectional interests. We see that time and time again. Remember the Jobs and Skills Summit, one of the first things that this government did when it came into office. It invited small business representatives in and they completely screwed them over. We know that, because they completely ignored the messages that businesses, even large and small, were telling them at the Jobs and Skills Summit and only paid attention to union demands, which they have pandered to, over and over again.

LAURA JAYES: The Liberal Party didn't even turn up to that one, it was left to The Nationals David Littleproud, but look, you can’t blame me for trying to get announcements out of you today Jane, we will try every week in the lead-up to the election and sometimes we might be successful, thanks so much for your time.