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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4413 ..

of the operation of the Small Business Commissioner and a review of the act after it has been in operation for two years. I would be supportive of those amendments. I guess that we should adopt a “suck it and see” approach.

Once a commissioner has been put in place we will give him or her time to things sort out and we will review that position after a period of two years. If this legislation is passed I hope that in that two-year period the government, the Small Business Commissioner and his or her support staff are able to work through some of the concerns that have been raised tonight. I hope that they achieve their aim, which is to simplify and respond to the amount of government bureaucracy that businesses sometimes face.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (9.35): Opposition members do not support the Small Business Commissioner Bill. We reached that decision after carefully considering the merits of the bill. In principle there should be no requirement for a Small Business Commissioner if the government and its existing agencies were doing their job effectively. There is nothing that a Small Business Commissioner could do that is not already being done by existing agencies. This government should be prepared to give some leadership and direction in those areas in which it wants to achieve.

The government is seeking to create the position of Small Business Commissioner but, in doing so, it is admitting that other parts of its bureaucracy—and the government itself—have failed in their task. Interposing a Small Business Commissioner into ACT bureaucracy will simply add another layer of bureaucratic red tape in a system that is already overly endowed with regulation. That will lead to additional costs for no clear benefit. Having consistently talked to businesses, one of the messages that I have received from them is, “Do not interfere. Get out of our way. Just let us get on with business and let us have no more red tape.”

It is revealing to consider some of the words used by the Treasurer when he presented this bill. He said that the Small Business Commissioner would have a “day-to-day focus on removing or ameliorating the impediments that are often put in the way of small business doing business.” That is a laudable aim but it begs the question: Why do the impediments exist in the first place? To develop the in-principle position a bit further, we suggest that if impediments are placed in front of small business, or any business for that matter, the proper role of government should be to act to remove those impediments.

The optimum response by a government to a situation such as this would be not to create additional bureaucracy in this instance by creating a Small Business Commissioner. This government’s response to complaints from small business is a typical Labor response: It creates another bureaucratic structure to attend to the symptoms of the problem rather than tackling the causes of the problem. In this context it is pertinent to ponder on the results that are contained in a recent bulletin from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on small businesses in Australia.

The bulletin reveals that the small business sector in the ACT does not appear to be as healthy as the government would have us believe. I have already referred to statistics in a recent business forum and to the response from the Treasurer. He issued a rather silly press release in response to my comments. In the process he answered a question in this Assembly and made some questionable observations about the world of statistical

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