Friday 18 July 2025

EO&E........................................................

STEVE PRICE: 

Joining me now is the brand new Shadow spokesman for Small Business, Industrial Relations and Employment and as I said the teal slayer Tim Wilson. Good to catch up with you Tim, when you saw those numbers yesterday and I know you talked to a lot of people in your electorate and a lot people in you electorate own small businesses. You wouldn't have been surprised, I don't suspect. 

TIM WILSON: 

Sadly not Steve. The reality is when businesses are going under and we have record insolvencies right now, the only follow through will be a rise in unemployment. Everything in this economy that should be going up is going down and everything should be going down is going up. Energy prices are going up, unemployment is going up, businesses are going down, and where people are facing really difficult choices about how they're going to operate and it ultimately flows through to jobs. And I'd like to say this is going to be the end but I can't say that with confidence based on the Albanese economic sinkhole model. 

STEVE PRICE: 

And Tim, it's a combination of state and federal factors, isn't it? I mean, you and I, you know, once had the pleasure of being residents of Melbourne. We now are trapped in the state of Victoria where for small business people trying to make ends meet, it's even harder because the amount of taxes that have been introduced, local taxes on businesses, including, you know, land taxes and work cover and all of those things have gone up. It's even harder to do business in the State of Victoria, isn't it? 

TIM WILSON: 

Resolutely, yes. If you talk to small business people in Victoria, what they'll tell you is, you know, demand is very challenging because people have low disposable income, government continues to spend a lot of money, borrow from tomorrow. Pay for today, that's putting upward pressure on inflation. That means interest rates have remained and persisted to be high. That means that people simply don't have the money in their hip pockets. But then on the other side, they're paying massive energy bills if they're an energy dependent business. Taxes are out of control in this state. And it means that a lot of people who might ordinarily consider Victoria, just like any other state, as a destination for investment is now saying they're not going to. And you're seeing this, for instance, in building, where a lot of developers simply say, we can't build new projects in Victoria because the timeframe between what we decide we want to do and then going through to it, we could see land tax increases, increases on other capital costs like the unrealised capital gains tax, the family savings tax that federal Labor is introducing, which directly disincentivises future investment in not just Victoria and in Australia. And they're saying an uncertain environment means no investment because people aren't confident about the future. And of course, that has a multitude of factors, including again, it hits consumers because they have to pay higher rents. As a consequence, they have less money to then go and spend in their local shop, in the local small business and to be able to improve their quality of life. 

STEVE PRICE: 

Tim, I know by nature you're an optimist. I mean, you'd have to be to stand for a second term of federal parliament and, you know, cross your fingers, do all the hard work, get re-elected. Do you have any optimistic feeling about this tax roundtable that Jim Chalmers is gonna have? 

TIM WILSON: 

Well, not really. What we've seen from this government is they're pushing forward with taxes that nobody voted for. Research, publicly released research, shows that Australians didn't go into the last election thinking they would be voting for a family savings tax on unrealised capital gains. In fact, even Labor's Matt Gregg in the federal electorate of Deakin told his voters that wasn't Labor's policy, but he is now going to go on and vote for it in the federal parliament. And this tax roundtable is only designed to do one thing, which is to float taxes that Labor had not raised before the last election. And then put them on the table. And I don't want to break it to you, Steve. I've never seen a Labor government that goes in talking about how they're going to cut tax, only what types of taxes they're going to increase. So I don't have much confidence about it. But more importantly, you can't trust this government when they propose taxes after an election that they simply didn't tell people about before the election. This is an issue of trust, and they're gonna fail. 

STEVE PRICE: 

Tim, just before you go, I know you keep an eye on the rise of antisemitism, you've got a large Jewish constituency in Goldstein, how is it that people are still allowed to march through the streets of Melbourne chanting death, death to the idea? 

TIM WILSON: 

We have the laws in place. What we have is a lack of leadership and political will. It took literally people trying to burn down the East Melbourne synagogue before both state and federal Premier and Prime Minister were prepared to stand up and categorically condemn the rise of antisemitic violence. Up until that point, there has been too many times where they've been silent or stood on the sidelines, not making any significant comment. They've dawdled to the point of violence. And of course, when you have laws in place to deal with the issues of antisemitism, including people who are actively speaking about committing acts of violence or death, it's clearly a failure, a continuing failure of political will. We need leadership on antisemitism. The Government isn't providing it, and the consequences have already been felt and will continue to be felt until they actually show it. We now have the Government even delaying its response to measures that have been proposed to address antisemitism. Such is their lack of clarity, moral clarity, on this important issue. 

STEVE PRICE: 

Absolutely disgraceful. Tim Wilson good to catch up with you. 

ENDS