Page 3392 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 19 August 2009
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that it will “enhance the role of Business ACT to focus on”—and the second-last dot point reads:
The provision of support for the Small and Micro Business Advisory Council that will advise the Government and the Small Business Commissioner on policies and programs for this important industry sector.
Ted Quinlan got it, and you can understand why Ted left the Assembly when both of his initiatives, the Small and Micro Business Advisory Council and the Small Business Commissioner, got the flick. The Small Business Commissioner probably had the shortest life of any statutory commissioner in the history of the ACT, because he got the bullet in the 2006 budget as well. The annual report for 2005-06, under “Policy development”, states:
Business Community Consultation—The Canberra Partnership Board focussed on a number of key issues during the year, including initiatives to encourage innovation in ACT businesses, and actions to address the Territory’s current skills shortage. The Government’s primary mechanism for consulting with the small business community was through the Small and Micro Business Advisory Council … A remodelled SMBAC was launched in August 2005 chaired by the ACT Small Business Commissioner.
Gee, August 2005; gone, June 2006. It was not very long-lived, unfortunately.
Of course in the For the future 2006 budget document, under “Reforming economic development”, there are a couple of amazing statements. The first is:
… the Territory’s small size and narrow economic base limited the Government’s capacity to seriously influence and assist business activity and economic opportunities.
Think about that statement: the territory’s small size and narrow economic base limited the government’s capacity to seriously influence and assist business activity and economic opportunities. So it is a matter of saying, “Business, it’s your fault that we, the government, can’t help you grow because we’re too small because you’re too small.” That is just amazing. What a cop-out that is.
The other problem for this crowd is that, as a consequence of the flawed Costello review, the functions of the Small Business Commissioner were absorbed into the department and, of course, the majority of small business support and grants programs simply disappeared off the face of the earth. It is a shame, really, because here we are, a couple of years later, reinventing the wheel, with opportunity lost and the need for momentum to be regained—all of the things that should have been considered before this occurred.
So you had that disastrous budget in 2006 when the Stanhope-Gallagher government rationalised support for business. They abolished their Small Business Commissioner. In effect, I did not have a gripe with it; we were not particularly supportive of it at the time, simply because it was an admission of failure. But they removed a number of advisory bodies, including the Small and Micro Business Advisory Council. That
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