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

Yes, sure. What it involves is building a single national system. You would perhaps be surprised to know that in some jurisdictions the systems are still paper based. I think you are talking about a software problem with the non-recognition of the ‘&’. The problems could even be worse than that in terms of still having paper based systems. The build of this national system is quite a sophisticated exercise. I would hope and expect, being a brand-new system in the 21st century, it will be capable of picking up these sorts of problems. It certainly will be a vast improvement on the systems that are now in place.

I would like to go to the question about the business enterprise centres. I think it was in Senate estimates where there was a line of questioning to departmental officials—I know this did not come from you—as though there was something terribly sinister about a party in opposition deciding to fund a particular array of business enterprise centres, which at that time was 36 out of about 108. This meant, subsequently, further BECs being established. It was using the resources of opposition which, as you would be all too aware, are not extensive. Departmental officials were being asked about their level of involvement in the selection of these BECs. If I had been at Senate estimates I would have said it was nil, because they would have told us where to go if we had approached the department as an opposition and said ‘Could you tell us where we might fund BECs’.

What I did do in relation to that, which I thought was the best effort I could make, was to get a set of gradings, if you like, as imperfect as they might have been, from BEC Australia, who were familiar with them all. They said to us, ‘Look, these ones seem to be going especially well and these ones are going pretty well’. We did not stick to that religiously, but what I was conscious of doing was ensuring there was a reasonable geographic spread and anticipating the likelihood of the coalition asserting that they were all in marginal Labor seats. I wanted to assure myself that they were not. In fact, there was a very reasonable spread across coalition and Labor seats, marginal and safe. We just did the best that we could.

The alternative, with the money I was able to get through our opposition budget processes, was to spread it across all 108 BECs, and they would barely have noticed the addition to their funding. I suppose another consideration is that the department would have had to administer amounts of, say, $25,000 in each of 108 BECs, so you can see the administration costs of that would have been higher. In terms of new BECs being added and so on, we have not in the budget identified any extra funding for BECs, so at this stage we need to stick with the 36 that we are funding.

In terms of small business advocacy, I can assure the member for Dunkley that I have very good access to all of the relevant processes, including the Prime Minister, on small business matters. He was very supportive during the global recession of the small business tax break, and in fact he extended it, increasing it from 30 to 50 per cent. I must go more often to him with proposals, hoping and expecting that he will not only accept them but also augment them, as he did in this case! We do have the formal departmental processes as well, through coordination, comments and so on, where Minister Carr in a discussion would represent those views. In any event, a variety of formal and informal processes are available to me and I make sure that I take every advantage of those. I feel very happy that my views are heard and policies are developed in response.

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