Page 1872 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 June 2021
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Yet what the minister revealed this morning was that in fact more than four in five eligible Canberra businesses did not participate in the scheme. I will repeat that because it is an important point that the government certainly does not want Canberrans to know: more than 80 per cent of businesses eligible to register did not bother. What a huge vote by our small business sector of no confidence in this tired Labor-Greens government.
The fact is that business uptake of ChooseCBR was incredibly low, with less than one-fifth of businesses participating. Surely, you would imagine that a business would jump at a scheme to help them, but many business owners clearly decided that it just was not worth the stress and effort of signing up. Others which did register, such as Deakin IGA, stopped accepting vouchers, apologised to staff and customers for the distress the scheme had caused, and rightly said that it was not their fault.
Under the relaunched ChooseCBR initiative, almost $390,000 of vouchers were claimed in the first two days alone, despite the fact that the system was down for much of that time. When the scheme was finally resurrected after its seven-day hiatus, the rest of the $2 million disappeared like water down a plug hole, all gone in the space of one day, with vouchers apparently being redeemed well into the night.
Given the government hype around the revamped ChooseCBR, it is interesting to note the spin when things did not go to plan—in other words, when the business minister hugely underestimated how popular the scheme might be for customers.
While to most Canberrans the system crashed because the government failed to properly load-test it, with the government then forced into damage control while frantically working out how the scheme might be revived, the 11 June media release issued by the minister put it in more soothing tones when it stated that the program had merely been “paused”. The soothing words continued. The release stated:
We are very conscious of the inconvenience and frustration this has caused to both businesses and customers, despite our best efforts to fix the problems to date.
The world of small business is vastly different to what most people in this Assembly would know about. As a former small business operator, knowing success and failure, I know the fear that small business owners live with, the toll that family-run businesses have on relationships and family life, the constant grind and the fact that there is no respite. So when the best that a government can do when its $2 million program is failing is talk about “inconvenience” and “frustration”, it just does not go down well.
The government might get away with it because it is not their money, but business does not have such a luxury. Any business owner knows that if you cause inconvenience and frustrate your customers, you suffer the consequences—the customers disappear. There is no such accountability from this tired and out-of-touch government, which seems too used to power and increasingly takes the support of Canberrans for granted.
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