• Welcome to the Green and Gold Rugby forums. As you can see we've upgraded the forums to new software. Your old logon details should work, just click the 'Login' button in the top right.

A government that hates small businesses

Status
Not open for further replies.

Scotty

David Codey (61)
Watch out if you are an individual contractor, or self employed running a small business. Shorten is out to get you.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au...orten-J-pd20110512-GS37P?OpenDocument&src=kgb

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the Gillard government is determined to suppress the capacity of people to be self-employed. The budget contains the latest hit against independent contractors as explained by Robert Gottliebsen.

This new measure is allegedly aimed to improve tax compliance by contractors. But it’s doing this by requiring self-employed people and those who engage them to comply with the ATO’s massive new reporting regime. With both parties now obliged to comply, every commercial transaction between self-employed people and their clients will have to be reported to the ATO, twice.

The government says that the ATO will then data match to check if tax is being paid.

The new regime is to start in construction and move out from there. Imagine this – every plumber, carpenter, brickie, engineer, draftsman and architect will have to take copies of every invoice and supply these to the ATO. Every home-builder, earthmover and construction firm will have to do the same, including invoices they receive and send.

And the reason why the government would do this? Self interest of course:

From the perspective of self-employed people the agenda the government is pushing is quite different to one concerned with ensuring a fair tax system.

In the year to August 2010, trade union membership dropped by another 47,300 to 18 per cent of the workforce. Independent contractor numbers increased by 100,000 around the same time. Total self-employment now sits at around 21 per cent of the workforce. This is a trend that attacks the core political base of the Gillard government.

Unions’ real power does not sit in their actual membership numbers. Instead, through the industrial relations system, unions have legal jurisdiction over the entire workforce but this only extends to employees. As more people become self-employed, unions power drops. It’s long been a union agenda to stop this. A key mechanism is revealed in this budget.

The complex reporting system to be imposed on independent contractors will massively increase the transactions costs of being self-employed or doing business with self-employed people. This, the unions presumably hope, will cause businesses to not deal with self-employed people and shift to employees. They are probably correct. If they can deny self-employed people clients, they force people to be employees.

That’s why the firing of this red tape ‘gun’ by the Gillard government amounts to a declaration of war by stealth against self-employed people.

If this explanation proves true, then forget about tax issues! Forget about the encouraging of entrepreneurship from small business people. Forget about welcoming diversity and individuality into how our society approaches work. Think only of self-interested political power, raw and naked.
 

Aussie D

Dick Tooth (41)
As bad as labour's attack on independent contractors is the coalitions record when it came to small business under the Howard government wasn't much better. They sat on their hands whilst Coles and Woolworths decimated small businesses, farmers, etc.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top