The State of Small Business in Australia: What Recent News Means for You

Australian small business owners are navigating a lot right now — a looming trust tax overhaul, a cost-of-doing-business squeeze, and infrastructure that can't always be relied on. Here's a plain-English rundown of three stories that broke recently, and what they actually mean if you run a small or family business.

The trust tax crackdown has small business advocates worried about restructuring costs

The federal government's proposed reforms would impose a new 30% baseline tax on discretionary trusts, and Treasury has published a consultation paper detailing how it would work. Tax and accounting experts have raised concerns that the reforms could disrupt small businesses, warning that proposed carveouts do little to prevent many businesses from also facing a significant stamp duty hit if they restructure away from a trust arrangement (SmartCompany, 10 July 2026).

For many small and family businesses, a discretionary trust isn't a tax minimisation trick — it's simply how the business has always been structured, often for succession and asset-protection reasons that have nothing to do with reducing tax. If your business operates through a trust, this is worth watching closely as the consultation process plays out and state governments decide how they'll handle any flow-on stamp duty costs.

Merchant fees are coming down — a small but real cost saving

Not all the news is cost pressure. Commonwealth Bank has announced it's cutting its Merchant Service Fee from 1.1% to 0.99% per transaction for in-store payments, a move explicitly aimed at easing cost pressure on small businesses (SmartCompany, 31 August 2026).

It's a modest reduction on paper, but for businesses processing a high volume of in-person transactions, it adds up over a full year — and it's a rare instance of a major bank moving costs in the business's favour rather than the other way around.

The Telstra outage was a wake-up call for business continuity

Australian Small Business Minister Anne Aly urged small businesses to keep thorough records after Telstra's nationwide network outage disrupted mobile services and payment systems, including EFTPOS, for businesses around the country (SmartCompany, 8 July 2026).

It's a timely reminder that resilience isn't just about your finances or your marketing — it's about whether your business can keep functioning when something outside your control goes down. That applies just as much to your team as it does to your systems: a business with too few people, or the wrong people in the wrong roles, is just as exposed to a "shock" as one running on a single telco's network.

The common thread

Cost pressure, compliance complexity, and operational risk aren't going away for Australian small businesses any time soon. What separates businesses that manage through it from those that get overwhelmed usually comes down to one thing: having the right team in place, so problems get solved rather than piling up.

If your business is stretched thin trying to handle growth, compliance, or unexpected disruption on top of the day-to-day, having the right people can make all the difference.