Who’s carrying the flag to help the multitude of small business owners at this Roundtable? And will serious change occur for these Australians currently feeling the pain, despite being backbone of our economy.

Excuse me for being preoccupied with the productivity reform roundtable, but as a business owner (and to be accurate, an entrepreneur), I’m wondering who will be the flagbearers for the 2.5 million small business owners in Australia? And I’m wondering if that aforementioned flagbearer has the guts to say what most of these potential business builders think is getting in the way of them being more productive.

What business owners or entrepreneurs want makes me think of the Mel Gibson movie What Women Want. What one reviewer said of this film seems so relevant to what should follow this Canberra get together, but it probably won’t. For those who’ve forgotten the movie, Mel Gibson’s character was a chauvinist. Because of a number of life challenges, he was driven to want to work out what women wanted, after largely never giving a damn.

The parallel is the team of federal and state politicians who always pay lip service to small business but never really give a damn. And like Gibson with women, they really don’t know what small businesses want.

As the reviewer of Gibson’s movie observed: “The main idea (that there is no need for men to read our minds, but to listen what we say, like in 80%, not in 3%) is smoothly expressed throughout the movie. My favourite thing was that, at one point, the main character started helping (you guessed right - women). And that's what makes this film uplifting.”

This roundtable’s goal should be to actually listen to the leaders of the productivity game changers — entrepreneurs and company CEOs — who make the decisions, employ the workers and take the risks that could deliver success or failure.

Few politicians have faced the material life and death challenges of being in business. Running a business means coping with:

1. Customers with platforms to criticise you.
2. New age workers with unusual workplace expectations.
3. Tax offices, federal and stateside.
4. Government regulators and their red tape time and money killers because often experts are needed to help deliver the information.
5. Official statisticians that also demand information, which takes time and/or money.
6. Overworked accountants who often aren’t giving business and tax advice because they’re doing government-created compliance work.
7. The Fair Work Commission, with its rules around dismissal, workplace bullying, mental health and other important but sometimes worker-exploited issues encouraged by exploitative lawyers or ambulance chasers.
8. And even Donald Trump and his US-selfish tariffs that represent just another curve ball some Aussie business owners, who are also exporters, have to deal with.

I could go on and on. I don’t believe all regulation, including workplace regulation, is wrong. But someone in the Federal Government has to seriously look at the challenges facing small business.

Some of it is the education and the inspiration of the 2.5 million small business owners out there. But that politician also has to make their colleagues care about and feel the pain of the people who’ll be the prime movers in pushing up our productivity.

A good first step has been made by Prime Minister Albanese in bringing the new Small Business Minister Dr Anne Aly into the Inner Cabinet, which other governments haven’t done.

However, the next step is to allow Dr Aly to get brutally honest with what needs to change to genuinely help small businesses to get more productive.

Issues such as work-from-home, dismissal of poor workers, big business exploitation of small rivals, productivity spoiling regulators and even state governments with their excessive abuse of the grouping provision that elevate payroll tax collection over encouraging businesses to innovate and diversify into other activities.

I’d argue that while few small business owners know who Dr Anne Aly is, because 2.5 million small business owners are important to bolstering the country’s productivity, their national political leader should be well-known. And that leader needs to be a butt-kicking, rabble-raising demander for change.

That’s what small business owners want!