Page 3021 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 October 2022
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Access Canberra service centres, who will act as knowledgeable first points of contact for customers. It also adds 11 people to the Working with Vulnerable People Team in this financial year. A WWVP registration is an essential requirement for many jobs, as well as for volunteering in the ACT, with close to 130,000 registered people. The WWVP scheme, as we term it, provides additional checks and balances to protect a wide range of vulnerable Canberrans, including children, those in hospital and aged care, or those who need support and assistance to complete their daily activities.
The funding provided in this budget supports Access Canberra to deliver regulatory and consumer protections and to maintain accessible and responsive customer services that give Canberrans back valuable time. It ensures that Access Canberra continues to do its remarkable work to support our city to be one of the most liveable in the world.
Before I move to the arts, I want to reflect very briefly on Ms Castley’s comments on business survival rates. Very seriously, I know that Ms Castley comes to this place with lived experience of running a business and the very personal lens that she views things through. She has detailed and certainly understands that very personal cost to running a business in many ways, and I certainly have a lot of empathy with that.
I want to reflect that we also have that personal and very human role in looking at what those figures are telling us in business entry and exit rates and interpreting that data. It is not that we are only looking at the data or only thinking about the business experience; we can do both. What the facts tell us is that businesses here in the ACT are growing and growing at an extraordinary rate, and that is very pleasing.
It is not to say that the business exit rate is not something we are looking at and wanting to understand better, but I can say that it is non-employing businesses that make up the largest proportion of total non-surviving businesses every year and for the four-year period to June this year. That does skew the overall business exit result, and I certainly think that is worth reflecting on.
Again, we do want to undertake work to understand that better overall, but I think Ms Castley’s appreciation or understanding of what the experience is overall is not necessarily accurate—however much I absolutely understand that very personal cost for people if they do make that decision to close or end their business, for whatever reason.
Moving to the arts, and I acknowledge Ms Lawder’s contribution before and thank her for what is a genuine interest, understanding and valuing of the arts in Canberra. I also appreciate that Ms Lawder really gets what we are trying to do and where we are trying to take the city with the arts.
I do not think we have had any representations from you before, Ms Lawder, about the grants process, but I am very happy, through you, Madam Speaker, to have that conversation about any ways we can make it simpler or more straightforward. We have certainly been working on that, but if there are other suggestions the door is open. I am very willing to have that conversation.
We do have the ambition for Canberra to be recognised as Australia’s arts capital. To support this, in July we released our new Arts, Culture and Creative Policy for the
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