Mal Farr November 15 2012 news.com.au TONY Abbott will today promise to double small business growth if elected, in a bid to win support from the sector. The Opposition Leader will pledge to boost the number of small businesses by “around 1.5 per cent” annually. Current growth is averaging 0.7 per cent a year. The move means Mr Abbott is effectively promising to return small business to the growth rates of the Howard government, before the global financial crisis. The doubling would produce about 30,000 extras businesses a year, with a significant increase in job numbers. “Specifically, the focus will be on growing the number of small businesses that employ and provide jobs,” Mr Abbott says in a speech prepared for delivery today to a Menzies Research Centre forum on small business in Melbourne. “I want to once again see small business providing more than half of the jobs in…

ANDREW BURRELL AND BLAIR SPEEDY November 15, 2012 The Australian RICHARD Goyder, chief executive of Perth-based Wesfarmers — the largest private sector employer in Australia — is optimistic that rising consumer confidence sparked by lower interest rates will produce a stronger Christmas trading period for the nation’s retailers. Mr Goyder said the conglomerate’s retail division, including its Coles, Kmart and target businesses, was seeing “green shoots” of improved consumer sentiment and he had become slightly more optimistic about Christmas. “As long as there are no disasters, if we can get a positive mindset it should be a half-decent Christmas,” he said yesterday after the group’s annual general meeting in Perth. Mr Goyder said the recovery was most visible in Wesfarmers’ discretionary retail businesses, including Target and Kmart. “That’s based around lower interest rates and, importantly, an expectation that that may continue,” he said. “In other words, I think the commentary…

NACS Daily News The Republic asserts that the regulations will undermine its tobacco industry. GENEVA – Late last week, the Dominican Republic requested the establishment of a panel under the dispute settlement procedures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) challenging Australia’s plain packaging measures for tobacco products. Starting Dec. 1, Australia will mandate that all tobacco products be sold in plain packaging. Packaging will be a standardized drab brown color, with the brand and variant name in a standardized font and place, banning all logos or other design features. This move will prevent tobacco products from using their well-known trademarks and geographical indications, the republic stated in a press release. These unprecedented measures will undermine the Dominican Republic’s tobacco industry, in particular its premium cigar sector. By prescribing standardized plain packaging, the tobacco market will be driven towards commoditization, with declining prices, and increasing — rather than falling — consumption…

JANE E. BRODY November 12, 2012 New York Times Few smokers would claim that it’s easy to quit. The addiction to nicotine is strong and repeatedly reinforced by circumstances that prompt smokers to light up. Yet the millions who have successfully quit are proof that a smoke-free life is achievable, even by those who have been regular, even heavy, smokers for decades. Today, 19 percent of American adults smoke, down from more than 42 percent half a century ago, when Luther Terry, the United States surgeon general, formed a committee to produce the first official report on the health effects of smoking. Ever-increasing restrictions on where people can smoke have helped to swell the ranks of former smokers. Now, however, as we approach the American Cancer Society’s 37th Great American Smokeout on Thursday, the decline in adult smoking has stalled despite the economic downturn and the soaring price of cigarettes.…