Communications is about respect

Is the government deliberately gas-lighting small business people? Or is it just a lack of appreciation? Or maybe some good old-fashioned unconscious bias?

Poor communications is often a sign of a lack of respect or a lack of understanding or a lack of care. Whether it is one to one between individuals or in the workplace with employees or with tax payers. Communications is one of the main ways people signal value, recognition and seriousness toward others.

So, the Albanese government does not value, care for or want to understand small businesses as people. The words they used around their small business policies are disturbing. Let’s look at their communications.

The sale of a business is now seen as a windfall. We know winning lotto is a windfall, finding a gold nugget is a windfall, finding the love of your life is often a windfall. None of these are taxed, so should they be? To describe the sale of a business for top dollar as a windfall is so intellectually and economically shallow as to be bewildering.

The Treasurer has justified many of the changes by saying that wage earners do not have the same benefits as small business people. The comparison of the situation of a wage earner with that of a business operator is also bewildering. Is having a job a benefit? A job often provided by the small business person?

A wage earner gets recognised automatically. Wages are recognised as labour, overtime is recognised, leave exists, workplace protections exist, Australia’s wages are some of the highest in the world and our employment conditions are the envy of many. Still the Labor Government sees the workers as not getting the same benefits as small business people.

For founders and small business owners their unpaid hours of work now appear as a capital gain, intellectual property is treated as an asset and taxed, years of stress are compressed into a taxable event.

What benefit do small business folk get? Reward for effort same as employees. But the government wants more from the employer.

My experience with government and their interaction with small business is one that spans decades. Early on the ministers for small business were tasked with keeping the sector quite while the government of John Howard, with support of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), set about on a path to laissez-faire economics – which is never friendly to small business people. Interestingly Mr Howard and ACCI both waxed lyrical about small business but rarely matched the words with deeds. John Howard lost his seat in the election of 2007 and 19% of that electorate were self-employed. They voted him out.

Then a change occurred with the passion and persistence of a true small business champion in Bruce Billson. He became the shadow small business minister and eventually the Minister.  He was tireless and did not lecture small business but showed understanding and understood how to communicate. The budgets of which he was the small business Minister were the best communicated budgets in my long experience.

Then things changed again. The Albanese government has gone back to having small business ministers who are tasked with keeping the small business lobby quiet and happy while the government goes about making life harder and harder for the small business person or as the government knows them – the petit bourgeois.

In politics, business and personal life, people usually judge intent not just by outcomes, but by how something is explained. The budget changes have been very poorly explained.

The communication problem becomes bigger when the people affected already feel unseen and not valued.

That is why the language matters. In politics, poor communication is rarely just a technical failure. It signals priorities and assumptions.

That is particularly dangerous economically because entrepreneurship is partly psychological. People start businesses because they believe in themselves and that effort will matter and be rewarded, they understand they are taking a risk but it will pay off if they are smart enough and work hard, they believe society values initiative. But once people start believing the system and/or the government sees them as mugs rather than builders, fewer people take the leap.

That is why I find myself harking back to the old Hawke-Keating reform era. Leaders like Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Button often delivered hard economic reforms, but they usually framed business people, unions and workers as participants in national building not as adversaries or loophole seekers.

People can tolerate difficult policy well explained more readily than they can tolerate feeling dismissed as dodgy and privileged. Bring back Bruce Billson.