Page 3395 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 19 August 2009
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It is the perfect storm that was described. Cuts at a federal level, cuts at an ACT level, will become the perfect storm for business in the ACT. That is the prospect, and the concerns out there are real.
Ms Burch talked about the government moving to reinvest in business. She is right: they are moving to reinvest, because they cut—they cut inappropriately, they cut at the wrong time. The ACT economy is suffering because of that, business is suffering because of that, and potentially unemployment is suffering because of that.
One of the biggest impediments to employment is often the lack of experience or the inability of business to upsize. There were some federal programs in recent years about getting micro businesses to take that first step, to employ their first employee, because many people had never done it before, they did not have the skills, they did not know what they needed to do.
Where appropriate, the government should step in and help those businesses so that we reap the long-term benefit for young Canberrans leaving school who want a job, for women returning from maternity leave who want a job, for older Canberrans who have retrained and who want to embark on a different career. Many of them, with the skills that they have, are ideally suited to working in small business or in micro businesses, but we have to have in place a regime that encourages it. We have to have in place the systems that make it simple. We have to have in place a government that champions the private sector so that people know that it is an appropriate place to be employed. And we have to have an understanding that the government is supportive of growing the private sector in the ACT—something that you will not find from this government because they do not like speaking about business.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.23): Like previous speakers, I am rising to support this motion. Of course I will be supporting this motion, because the reason that this small business forum is happening is that it is part of the Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement and therefore, obviously, an excellent idea. But apart from obviously being an excellent idea because it is in the agreement—
Mr Barr: Who could argue with logic like that?
MS LE COUTEUR: Exactly, Mr Barr: who could argue with that? But more seriously, small business is a really important part of our economy, and small and micro businesses are the part of our economy which tends to get neglected. There are many of them; they are all small. It has always been a lot of work for the government to consult with them properly.
That is why we put in the agreement that there needed to be a consultative forum. We did, I admit, call it a roundtable. The idea of this was to have a new model of engagement between the government and the micro home-based small businesses, because the previous ones either did not exist or had not been working. We want to have something that is a two-way exchange of ideas. We do not want something that is just the government saying blah, blah, blah. We want something where the government listens to the small business community and acts on what the small business community is saying.
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