Mr CRAIG KELLY (Hughes) (19:37): I am pleased to rise to speak on this motion by the member for Forde, which outlines some of the things the coalition did in the last budget in our small business package. I would particularly like to raise comments on some of the government policies made by one M Latham, a former Labor leader and former member for Werriwa, in an article titled 'Big is best', which I think is perhaps the most misguided, foolish and ignorant article I have ever read. In it the former Labor leader calls small business: … a pack of blank-faced losers serving up kebabs and pizza slices in greasy food halls and shopping malls. He goes on to say: … smallness is despised as inadequate … He goes on to cite examples of why big is best: the Big Banana, the Big Pineapple and the Big Peanut, which is perhaps quite poetic for one M Latham. He also goes on: Small businesses, in effect, are the garden gnomes of the modern economy—purely ornamental and totally dispensable. Well, we saw how dispensable they were! Sadly, that was an attitude that was held by that side of the parliament when they were sitting in government, for when they were in government 519,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector. An opposition member interjecting— Mr CRAIG KELLY: Under the policies of your side of the government, 519,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector. The small business sector share of private sector employment declined from 53 per cent to 43 per cent under your policies. For those that believe in the ideology that big is best, there are a few things that I would like to point them to. Firstly, there is a beast called pig No. 6707. This was conceived in a laboratory in the US Department of Agriculture in the 1990s because they believed that it would be best if they could make the pigs bigger and bigger. But what they produced was 'a beast that was excessively hairy, riddled with arthritis and cross-eyed; too lethargic to stand, let alone mate'. The delusion that big is best is one of the reasons why the socialist economies of the old Eastern Bloc failed. They did not understand the importance of innovation. Those that believe that big is best should perhaps look at the problems with what is called island gigantism, where the size of animals on an isolated island, shielded from the natural competition, increases dramatically compared to the size of animals on the mainland. Examples are the elephant bird of Madagascar, the moa and the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant rabbits of the Mediterranean and, of course, the famed dodo bird. Without effective competition, as soon as more competition was introduced these things were simply too big and they failed and became extinct. I would put to you that our business sector here in Australia is in danger of falling to the evils of island gigantism. We have seen many sectors of our economy where people have the ideology that big is better. We have seen our industries grow and grow to where we simply have oligopolistic industries in almost every sector of the economy. This is not because bigger is more efficient; it is because of the way that government have set up the laws. We have seen that the rule of law—such an important factor in a productive economy—in this country is broken. A small business in a legal dispute with a larger business simply cannot win because it cannot finance the legal cost. We have seen the broken market for retail rents in this country where, because of government interference in the market and zoning laws to protect large retailers, there is the most distorted market where a large retailer will be paying two to three per cent of their turnover in rent while a smaller retailer will be paying 20 to 25 per cent. We have seen it in our failed competition laws. We have allowed anticompetitive price discrimination to take hold across the board. I think this one M Latham, the former Labor leader, gives it away when he talks in his article about his concern regarding the decline of union membership, because Labor knows in those large companies it is much easier to line up the workers—line them up in lines—and sign them up to union membership. It was an appalling, terrible article by the former member for Werriwa. (Time expired)