Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on this motion regarding the national business names register. If it were not for the fact that this motion is purely a political stunt, there may be some merit in it. The only genuine piece of goodwill towards small business in this motion is the date of commencement of operation, 28 May.

The national business names register, the register operated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, is a single place for an online registration application to operate across all states and territories under companies' registered business names. At its core it is about cutting red tape and cutting costs. That is something that this government has been and continues to be committed to. The online business names system provides many benefits over a paper based system, as anyone would understand. For a start, it is a single system across all states and territories, bringing together eight disparate databases. It is also open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and provides a bit of modernity. It recognises the reality that, in this day and age, if you are going to cut costs, cut bureaucracy and cut red tape for small business, you have to start doing a few things online and making them consistent. You make sure you do it once and for less than it used to cost.

The reality is that a paper based system is no longer an adequate tool for small business, nor was the cost of more than $1,000 for registration adequate. It is now around $30 instead—a massive difference. Also, the fact that this has been one of the most popular of databases run by government or ASIC is phenomenal. Over 15 million free business name searches have been conducted. The majority of those, of course, are to discover whether a business name is presently being used. It is much simpler to do it once than to do it eight times across all states and territories, with the fact that you might get something wrong during that process. Something like 530,000 renewal notices have been issued, with incredible amounts of activity. This has been an absolute success.

But I will acknowledge that, in all of these matters, when you are bringing together a complicated set of state and territory disparate databases, there will be a few teething problems—and there have been, and we have responded to those. That has been the whole point. A problem is identified, government responds and government puts forward extra funds. So we as a government are playing our role to ensure that small business is being looked after and that we continue to provide a way to cut red tape, a way to reduce costs and a way to provide protection. That is something that the opposition have not talked about in this. Protecting people's business names is as important as their privacy. Their privacy is absolutely important.

The opposition would be happy to know that, from immediately being alerted to this issue, we began work with ASIC and with other departments to look at legal issues and rights. For a start, there was not one consistent rule across states and territories on the privacy matter that they raised about post office boxes. It is one way in some parts of the country and different in other parts of the country. We have worked to a consistent line of trying to bring forward the best possible way to deal with these issues, but it is not a simple case. There are some very important issues about protecting consumers as well as protecting business in the proper identification of people's registered addresses. That can be done through a third party—for example, a solicitor, an accountant or another third party. It does not necessarily have to be the address of where, for example, the home business is based. There are a range of areas around how this works, and that is currently being considered by government: the best way to make sure that we get this right for small business.

Essentially, the national register is about having a single database—one place where you can go at any time of day or night, when it suits you as a small-business owner, not being told by some state department that you have to turn up between the hours of nine and five, which happens to be when you are trying to do your job as a small-business owner. It protects you against people who would otherwise steal your business name in another state or territory. It is a very good thing. It is cost-saving and it is all in one place.

While I have the brief opportunity, the member for Mayo said he has not received the letter in response, dated 16 May. Perhaps he would like a copy now of the letter that I am sure he has in his office. He seems to have come in here claiming he did not receive a response from me. I have the response in my hand. It was posted, it is dated and I signed it on 16 May. (Time expired)

See this speech in context