If anyone doubted the Prime Minister’s allegiance to the biggest employer in the country i.e. the small business sector, their doubts can safely be called accurate observations. This was confirmed when he accused café owners and restaurateurs of ripping off customers by hitting them with surcharges on Sundays and long weekends.

This has left the national president of the Restaurant and Catering Association of Australia, John Hart, fired up, telling the AFR’s Phillip Coorey that “hospitality businesses were being hammered by wage costs to the point they were scaling back staff and using QR codes, as well as applying surcharges”. (Just another indicator that AI is coming to replace jobs!).

He argues the extra charges are essential for these businesses to open on the weekends. “Hart said base wages in the sector had risen by 21 per cent in four years, driven by minimum wage increases and increases in the superannuation guarantee,” Correy wrote. “On Sundays and public holidays, penalty rates are up to 250 per cent of the base wage.”

Hart explained that wages were equal to 48% of turnover (or revenue) and when a 250% rate applied on a Sunday or public holiday, “you’re not making much money”.

I always try to be unbiased when it comes to elections, so I can see why employees might support Anthony Albanese’s policies, but small businesses have many good reasons to be anti-Labor.

Here are those reasons:

1. Under former Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Burke, wages growth has been 3% per annum, way above the long-run average of 2.4%.
2. Gig workers have been fairly treated as real workers, but this has added to the costs of small businesses, which in turn has added to the prices consumers pay.
3. Labor plans to ban non-compete clauses that will make it easier for employees to leave and ‘steal’ the clients of that business, its database and intellectual property. And yes, this does happen!
4. Labor has lumped these changes when already many small businesses carry debts and tax debts coming out of the Covid lockdown period. This wasn’t helped by customers often cutting back on spending as they endure 13 interest rate rises.
5. Persistently high inflation, which the RBA has indicated wasn’t helped by Labor’s budget decisions that added to demand, has made it harder for the central bank to cut rates, and businesses pay interest rates on borrowed money.
6. While there has been a long-promised commitment from governments of all political persuasions to cut red tape, anyone who owns a small business knows that the red tape not only increases annually, but because you now need to deal with online relationships with government departments, the time needed to comprehend and complete mandatory forms is a new impost on small business owners.
7. Managing the workplace has become harder as employees have been given encouragement to work from home. This can be great for employees both economically and socially but there’s not always a guaranteed dividend for the business owner.
8. There has been an escalation of employees accusing employers of ignoring sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, which not only means business owners need to put in place costly processes to ensure these issues don’t prevail, but some poor performing workers can falsify problems to try to receive compensation.
9. The inflation impost was bad for the entire country but the escalation effect for those businesses with big power bills was especially hard for businesses such as dry cleaners, big fridge users, fleets of vehicles and so on.
10. There’s no rallying call and effective policies put forward to help the country’s army of small businesses that really need leadership from Canberra.

While I suspect Labor will win next week’s election, if they do, I hope this list of 10 reasons why small business should be anti-Labor will be used by the next Small Business Minister to help this sector — not for future votes but to actually help a group of people who borrow to create businesses that employ, pay wages, train workers, bankroll education, mentor others, contribute to super and help this country grow.

Political parties have taken Australian small businesses for granted because they show up and do their part because their owners have skin in the game. However, it’s time for a “real” leader to appreciate this sector and make changes to help it.

The banning of non-compete clauses has been spruiked to help raise productivity. Turning an employee into an employer should do that, believer me! But what about actually helping the people already in business having to deal with these 10 anti-business obstacles to growth, profits and productivity.

The current Small Business Minister is Julie Collins. She should listen to the song Both Sides Now by Judy Collins. Then she just might see that there’s wisdom at looking at political life from a side that has never been high up on the priorities scale for this important political party in this country.

By the way, I’ve been asking for this kind of thing for over three decades at election time, so I’m not expecting this honest look at how governments disregard small business will ever be used to generate better politicians for this sector any time soon.

These words from Judy Collins could be relevant for Julie Collins, if she ever becomes a champion for small business. I’d like to substitute her word “life” for “small business”.

I've looked at small business from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's business illusions I recall
I really don't know small business at all.