Page 984 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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(ii) investigating other impact assessment models;
(iii) establishing appropriate triggers; and
(iv) establishing an inter-departmental committee; and”.
My amendments have two parts. The first is to note “the important role of micro, home-based, small and medium businesses in the ACT economy”. I think that we have pretty uniform agreement from everyone who has spoken here of the importance of those. I note that the original motion is about family businesses, and we are quite clear that family businesses and small businesses are not necessarily the same. Nonetheless, we can probably all agree that the micro, home-based and small and medium businesses have an important role in the ACT economy.
The more interesting part of my amendments is to insert a new (2)(c):
… improve the small business impact assessment process in the ACT planning system …
This is an area that certainly needs work. It is something the Greens have thought about for a long time; it actually reflects an item in our agreement with the Labor Party, where we said there was an issue with this.
We have been working slowly but steadily on this issue over the last few years. It has come to a head particularly in two places. The first is Civic, which I mentioned, and the impact of QIC. I mentioned that in my original speech so I will not go into Civic in great detail. The other place where it has come into play in the public arena has been in Giralang. I will not speak about that at huge length, because I note, first, that there is a supermarket competition inquiry and, second, that, I understand, it is subject to a Supreme Court action at this point in time. But these two examples are enough to illustrate the point that I am making: we need a better small business impact assessment process in the ACT planning system. What we have got at present does not work very well.
One of the most obvious reasons why it does not work very well is that the small business impact assessment is commissioned and paid for by the large business which will be potentially impacting on small business. We have gone through it over the years as a society and we have considered the conflict of interest situations here. We generally say that you cannot do your own assessment of your own actions in something like that.
While big business will always be commissioning some consultants, nonetheless they are the ones commissioning it. We do think it is appropriate that they pay for this work; there is no reason why the public purse should be paying for it. But the public purse, ACTPLA, can do the commissioning and make sure that it is a truly independent process. Possibly we have the situation where the independent consultant could be appointed from a panel. That might be the way to do it. I understand that in some instances ACTPLA has had to effectively commission a second small business impact assessment because the information in the first one that has been
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