Welcome

Welcome to the third edition of Small Business Network News. There are 2,585,979 small and medium businesses in Australia. We employ 7.8m people - 66% of total employment. But we have no representation in Canberra.

We should be the biggest and most powerful economic and political voice in Australia. We have the numbers to elect small business owners and champions to Parliament, providing we get organised. We CAN hold the balance of power in the country and level the playing field.

But it requires organisation and leadership. Building leadership and organisation for this sector is our mission. This Newsletter is published by the Small Business Network of Democracy First.

Join us. Sign up today.

Vern Hughes for the Senate in Victoria

Democracy First Convenor, Vern Hughes, will stand for the Senate in Victoria in the next federal election.

Paul Keating once famously described the members of the Senate as 'unrepresentative swill'. The comment was right, though Keating was referring to the minor parties in the Senate: in fact it is the major party hacks who are despatched there who are the 'unrepresentative swill'.

The six Senators from Victoria who will seek re-election next year read as a caricature of everything that is surreal about Australian democracy. The two ALP Senators are union officials. The two Liberals are an investment banker and a hack for the Institute of Public Affairs. The Green worked for the United Nations and Greenpeace. And the other one was thrown out of the Liberal Party for inappropriate sexual conduct in Canberra.

This is not made up. It is true. These are the six Senators from Victoria:

• ALP - Raff Ciccone, union official Shop Distributive Union.
• ALP - Jess Walsh, union official United Voice.
• LIB - Jane Hume, investment banker.
• LIB - James Paterson, think tank operative Institute of Public Affairs.
• GRN - Steph Hodgins-May, unelected, replaced retiring Janet Rice.
• IND - David Van, thrown out of the Liberal Party for inappropriate sexual conduct

Is it possible that these six Senators are not really representative of the diversity of people in Victoria?

Is there anyone in this list who represents small business?

There is no-one here who has started a small business or worked in one. This is the reality facing our 2,585,979 small businesses in Australia. We are not represented in our parliaments.

Vern Hughes will seek a mandate from voters to Get Career Politicians Out of the Senate and replace them with a whole new set of business and community representatives.

Vern says this:

"In the 1990s, I found myself running a primary health care centre in the western suburbs of Melbourne. It was begun by a Church with several idealistic GPs who wanted to provide holistic care to their patients (beginning with recognition of the simple starting point that half the attendances at GP surgeries are people who are lonely not sick).

It opened a shop-front and engaged community volunteers in providing prepared meals to people who were sick and frail. It was self-funding, without a cent of taxpayers money.

In time, it restructured as a consumer co-operative. Its 10,000 members employed the doctors, dentists, allied health practitioners and community nurses, who worked with a team of volunteers in providing social support and meals for the sick, from two primary care clinics in South Kingsville and Newport.

One of our member patients was Ralph Willis, then Federal Treasurer in the Keating Government. He told his Labor colleagues that this co-op was the most interesting thing in his electorate. He got a stream of health bureaucrats from Canberra and state governments to visit us and take notes, asking them if they could help us innovate in health care.

I discovered then that government is stuck in a cesspit of inaction. The Community Health people who visited said they couldn't help because this clinic wasn't a 'community health centre' which is something, in their book, that is only run by governments, not by a community. The Divisions of General Practice said our two clinics with 24 doctors couldn't be recognised as a 'general practice' because they weren't run by doctors, so the money being splashed around at the time in digitising private medical practices at taxpayer expense, couldn't be extended to medical clinics that were run by consumers. Our adult education work couldn't be recognised because it took place in a health facility not in an 'adult education facility'.

On and on it went. A thousand excuses why they couldn't do things differently. A thousand reasons why taxpayers money must be spent on useless box-ticking projects instead of an actual, real-life, self-funding, illness-preventing, community-building business.

From this experience I founded the Social Entrepreneurs Network (Australia and NZ) in 2000 to support innovators trying to do things better on the ground and drag governments into the 21st century."

www.democracyfirst.org.au/health/

What We Want

1. A level playing field for small and medium enterprises, removing all legislative and regulatory advantages and tendering preferments enjoyed by big business.

2. Revenue from exports to be tax-free for small and medium businesses to encourage export-oriented growth.

3. Abolition of levies and surcharges for firms employing less than 20 people.

4. A Small Business Support Agency in every federal electorate to provide practical business support including:

a. access to local employment, investment, retail and housing data, collected and curated for use by local businesses which employ less than 20 people;

b. information and advice on licencing, regulation and compliance issues;

c. shared training and workforce development;

d. shared access to a common pool of casual staff; and

e. shared purchasing arrangements.

5. An overhaul of federal and state industrial relations systems to allow greater flexibility for businesses which employ less than 20 people including exemption from penalty rates and unfair dismissal legislation, and additional flexibility for small and medium firms in which employees share in ownership and governance.

Are you a Small Business Champion?

We will stand a team of candidates from the SME sector in selected seats across the country in the next federal election.

We will mobilise small business owners, staff and customers in support of them. We have the numbers to do this on a big scale.

There are 2.5m small business owners employing 7.8m staff. Then there are their customers, often people with longstanding relationships with these businesses and their people. Then there are their suppliers, who usually have extensive economic and social networks themselves.

Then there are the families and friends of all these people. We plan to field a team of candidates in all states and territories:

• 24 NSW
• 20 VIC
• 18 QLD
• 10 WA
• 6 SA
• 3 TAS
• 2 NT
• 1 ACT

We invite your EOI. Go to www.democracyfirst.org.au/smenetwork/

Join the Network

Sign up today. There is no cost. We want to get an initial 10,000 small and medium businesses on board to start the process of change.

Join up at www.democracyfirst.org.au/smenetwork/

Enquiries: Vern Hughes 0425 722 890 E: vern@democracyfirst.org.au