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

That is right. There were a lot of complexities, including advice on public liability insurance and so on. I thought the smart thing a Labor government could do if it did happen to win the election would be to provide one-stop-shop advisory centres. To my delight, I learned upon further inquiry that indeed these existed around Australia in the form of business enterprise centres. There were 107 business enterprise centres around Australia, so we would not need to invest in the bricks and mortar, which is very expensive; we would need to support them.

When I got more familiar with the management of the business enterprise centres, I asked them what Commonwealth funding they received for providing this one-stop-shop advisory service. The answer was: none. I thought: ‘Surely this could not be true?’ Surely a Liberal-National Party government that says it is the champion of small business was supporting 107 business enterprise centres in suburban and rural and regional Australia? There was not one cent of ongoing funding.

We have made a very substantial down payment on remedying that deficiency. We have been able to fund 36 business enterprise centres—not 107, it is true. What we would need to have done to fund all 107 was divide the available amount by 107 instead of 36. That would have been a very small amount of money and may not have made a lot of difference to individual business enterprise centres. We worked with BEC Australia, the overseers of the BEC network. They provided advice to us. But the decision as to which ones we would fund was ultimately that of the Labor opposition. We funded them in suburban Australia, we funded them in regional Australia and we funded them in rural Australia. For those who might be a little bit cynical about whether we funded them only in Labor seats or coalition seats, there was a press release on budget night which showed exactly where they are. They are distributed around Australia. We are doing what we said: we are funding them on time and in full. The funding starts from 1 July.

We have already established—and I know the member for Banks would be interested in this—some accountability with these business enterprise centres. While we do not want to micromanage, as the coalition government used to do, attaching strings to every dollar that it spent, we do want to make sure that there is proper accountability and transparency, so those agreements are being settled with the business enterprise centres around Australia. I think it is a great development. It is a great initiative for small business. It shows that the Rudd Labor government understands the value of these one-stop-shop advisory services. I can tell you that the business enterprise centres are thrilled with this initiative.

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