The Business Union launches as alternative for small operators

A new union will start in Brisbane next week, but “parasites” are not welcome to join, writes Des Houghton.

Many industry organisations in Australia neglect small business because they are the captives of the big-business groups that fund them.

So says Brisbane accountant and international cargo tycoon David Goodwin, who next Tuesday launches the Business Union to give a voice to the forgotten people.

Business Union membership, he says, will be made up chiefly of the small, family-owned businesses who are the engine room of the Australian economy.

“Small business makes big business happen,’’ he said.

He wants his union to attract business “doers”, not the “parasite class”.

His members may be truck drivers or trawler operators, café and milk bar owners, and any shopkeepers such as independent drycleaners or newsagents.

Membership is open to anybody who owns a business, but membership will not be open to public companies, he said.

Goodwin says small and medium-size business owners have been neglected by all sides of politics. Their rights had been trampled, he said.

“They have been completely overlooked. We will be the voice of the forgotten,’’ he said.

Goodwin points the finger at state and national chambers of commerce, the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group and big accounting and law firms and the big retailers.

“The Business Council of Australia has sold us out,” he said.

“They basically do what the Big Four banks tell them to do.

“In my opinion they have little or no sympathy at all for what small business wants – genuine private enterprise.”

Cargo tycoon David Goodwin. Picture: Des Houghton

Goodwin’s big beef is with overbearing bureaucrats. He sees their interference in the economy as one of the nation’s great failures.

He says there are office towers full of them dreaming up new ways to regulate behaviour that is none of their business in a free market.

Goodwin, 43, speaks with authority as a former state president of the Chamber of Commerce and a chair of an Australian Chamber of Commerce environment committee.

He also speaks with authority as a former chartered accountant with multinationals KPMG and Ernst & Young, now EY.

Goodwin was born in Bulawayo in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known. His family fled the troubled nation and landed in Queensland the very week the murderous tyrant Robert Mugabe seized power.

Goodwin grew up dirt poor in Toowoomba and attended St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ College and funded his own way through university chipping cotton on the Darling Downs.

His family grew up in a house set for demolition that his father moved to a rural block on the edge of town.

“We had to put a tarpaulin over it to keep out the rain,” he said.

He and his partner Mick Toomey own and run Interport, a successful cargo company at Lytton near the Port of Brisbane.

With 70 staff on the books he counts Interport as a medium business — like those he is hoping to attract.

Goodwin, who twice ran for the Senate for the LNP, is seeking an advisory board of like-minded free marketeers. Interestingly, Goodwin has no problems with traditional trade unions or the new independent, politically unaligned unions.

“Small business generally never has industrial problems,” he said.

He is suspicious of groups such as the chambers of commerce which are run by people who have never had skin in the game.

“There is virtually no one among them who has owned a business,” he said.

“When you hear them speak, they say ‘we want certainty from government’. No, we don’t.

“Small business, for example, has no interest in net-zero emissions targets. People who run their own business don’t agree with that. We are not interested in those sorts of things.

Cargo tycoon David Goodwin. Picture: Des Houghton

“We haven’t seen any of these organisations push back against any of the stupidity that has gone on at the national level: the closing of borders, the mandates...’’

He said small firms were angry that the Federal Government had outsourced its policing of the Covid-19 vaccination rules to them, when firms like Woolworths and Bunnings refused.

“Who wants to get involved in a conversation around who’s vaxxed or not? We don’t.

“That’s not my business. I don’t want to know. Half of (small businesspeople) go to sleep at night worrying about how they are going to pay the wages.

“Even when you are doing well you still worry about it. They don’t worry about this woke stuff.

“The chambers and business groups lobby for woke outcomes too, and don’t push back against the government.

“You see this on Budget night when they come out and say, ‘this is a great training package’ and the government is to be commended.

“I can tell you now, business doesn’t want new training packages. We train our staff, and frankly we don’t need government involved in it.

“Why do these organisations always want training packages? Because that’s how they make their money … more regulated training, more certificates, more bureaucracy. It doesn’t add one bit of value to a business.’’

Goodwin said he got the idea to start a union exclusively for business owners from industrial relations specialist Graeme Haycroft, a founding director of a string of independent unions up and running in four states. Goodwin’s union has enlisted Haycroft’s Red Union Support Hub, an umbrella organisation for his unions, to provide commercial and legal grunt work.

Here I declare I do freelance work for one of those unions, the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland.

THE WORKPLACE WHERE SICK KIDS ARE WELCOME

David Goodwin has children’s toys and a playpen in the sparsely furnished office he shares with his business partner Mike Toomey.

“At least two days a week the office looks like a daycare centre,’’ Goodwin said.

He said if a staff member’s child woke up with a snotty nose and was disqualified from attending their regular daycare centre, the child was welcome at his office.

Other mothers and fathers on staff may want to bring young children to work for other reasons.

“These sort of things happen all the time in the private sector,” he says.

He assists staff in financial strife.

“It means they are not stressed out on the days they are at work, so they work better.’’

Goodwin recently allowed a single mum on his team to take 30 days leave on full pay to care for her dying mother. The worker said she would make up the lost hours down the track.

He tells his staff they can have the job for life if they want it.

His advice to bosses? “Just pay the award and a little bit more. And if my guys work on Saturday and they don’t get to see their wives and kids it’s only fair I pay them a loading.”

Goodwin has had happy negotiations with unions and is amazed when big firms “flog themselves to death” over piddling issues.

“Frankly I think it is the HR departments attempting to make themselves relevant.

“HR departments magnify problems.”