Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moreton. He is certainly right in that Moreton is an area on Brisbane’s south side built on the hard work and entrepreneurship of small businesses. For the information of members, around one-third of the current seat of Moreton was in the seat of Rankin, so we have a lot of overlap and a lot of familiarity. The Australian Institute for Commercialisation is in Eight Mile Plains. So there is a lot happening that is really good in Moreton, and that is assisted in no small part by the election of the new member for Moreton, who is taking a very big interest in the small business community.

In relation to business enterprise centres, the Rudd government has done what it has done in so many other areas—that is, it has kept its election promises. When I first became the shadow minister for small business it became clear from talking with small businesses that what they would value most highly was the idea of a one-stop-shop advisory centre so that they did not have to go to all of these different places getting advice on how to set up a business, whether to incorporate, whether to be sole traders or partnerships, how to do their GST from day one and how to do the complicated BAS. They had to be an expert in tax before they could be an expert in small business.

See this speech in context