Page 4072 - Week 13 - Thursday, 10 November 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
of examples - is that one person had a truck that travelled only 24,000 kilometres in 12 years and that you do not see many people taking their families out on a tractor these days. If there was a problem there, why not handle the problem and still allow a concession for genuine farm vehicles? Farmers, as small businesses in the ACT, are under tremendous pressure.
Unemployment in the ACT is extremely high, particularly among young people. As of May 1994, the unemployment rate for 15- to 19-year-olds was nearly 25 per cent. That is amazing. A total of 6.6 per cent of people are unemployed. I suggest that if you look at how these figures are worked out you will realise that the unemployment rate is a lot higher than that. Their calculation is called creative accounting. It is suggested that, if you are working in a family business, working from home and so on, you are not really unemployed. There are many situations like that. The figures are reduced anyway; but, even if they were not, we would have real problems because total unemployment in the ACT as of August this year was 10,600 people. That is a great number of people in a council size area.
There is another company in the ACT that was given the job of recycling confidential materials from the bunker, from the Federal Parliament. What do you do with all the paper? There are tonnes and tonnes of the stuff. Instead of just dumping it, they worked out a process whereby they could recycle it and get quality recycled paper, which I am informed is a problem. Some recycling processes leave you with paper that it is difficult to recycle because it does not bind well. Nevertheless, this company does the job. They sought assistance from the ACT. None was forthcoming. There has been some departmental involvement. I spoke at some length with the person at their site at Hume. Unfortunately, there were some rules and regulations that almost put the person out of business. Again, I am not saying that I disagree with certain rules and regulations. But I think we have gone over the hill; I think we have gone too far. I have mentioned in this Assembly that since Federation we have produced some three million laws, and we are introducing laws at the rate of thousands a year, with thousands of regulations under those laws.
We have reached the situation where it is tremendously stressful to try to run a business. You have to be very good at the business that you are running. You also have to be very good at accounting. Not everybody can afford an accountant. You have to be very good at personnel management and you have to be very good at trying to ward off government impositions and restrictions and trying to get around red tape, which takes an enormous amount of time. I spoke to a representative of the Business Council about a recent survey, and I was told that a lot of people in the ACT are positive about business potential but are quite apprehensive about the rigmarole you need to go through to get something off the ground and to keep it going and also about the amount of time you need to put in to achieve this. The solution I suggest is some genuine fast-tracking. Let us start rewarding departments for how many new businesses there are and how many businesses expand in some way. That would be a far better idea. I look forward to hearing positive suggestions from the Government and others on how to solve these problems.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .