Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the small-business community of Forde, I would like to thank the member for Dunkley and shadow minister for small business—the only shadow minister for small business on the coalition side—for this motion. Once again, we see an idea that has merit being very poorly implemented by this government. I reiterate what this motion seeks to note. As we all agree, the operation of the business owner register has been in place since 28 May 2012. Unsurprisingly, once again we see a government that has taken an enormous amount of time to act to fix implementation problems when they were recognised. One of the key issues has been the issue around privacy for home based businesses. In addition, we see that businesses have been waiting on hold for up to 45 minutes. I am aware of some cases where it has taken longer, and then they have been cut off, only to progress to an operator when contacting ASIC to have their questions or concerns dealt with. Equally, there are a large number of people who have been having problems registering, renewing, paying or transferring business names since the register was set up.

As I said at the outset, the idea has merit, but, as with many things that this government has done, it is the implementation that leaves an awful lot to be desired. My office received calls from people, particularly early in the piece, around the difficulty of accessing the ASIC website, difficulty in transferring or registering names, loss of documentation that has been provided, and going on to register and not being able to save registration part way through and having to go back to do the whole process again. The government at the time assured the coalition that home based businesses would have their privacy protected, yet this, another of the government's broken promises, is leaving business owners exposed and vulnerable. As the member for Dunkley has rightfully pointed out, this is just not good enough.

Also, despite promises being made to home based business operators, we again see small business being shunned by this government. This government cannot even fake that they have any kind of respect for the small business sector, which provides almost half of our entire workforce with employment. As the shadow minister has pointed out, since the rollout of the new system the coalition has received calls from small business owners, solicitors and accountants highlighting how the new system was botched from day one. It was heartening to see that the member for—

An honourable member: Dunkley?

No, it was not the member for Dunkley.

Honourable members interjecting—

No, the member for Chifley pointed out that there have been some improvements over the last few months, and I do congratulate them for that. But, as with anything, it takes an inordinately long time to get to these issues and to get them fixed. For those wishing to complain to ASIC about these issues, the general waiting time has been 45 minutes or longer. You can imagine that, if you are in small business and you have customers at the counter or ringing up to order a product, and you are sitting there on the phone to ASIC, you are not doing any business. You are not getting paid for it, and business are not there to be the paymaster to help solve the government's problems. They are there to build and grow their businesses, and it is from that that we continue to build the economy so that they are able to employ people and able to grow. It is just not good enough.

The coalition have tried to do something about this. We alerted the government to the problems with the register some 10 months or so ago, yet they chose to do nothing to help people with being able to register new business names. Finally we see in the last budget another $7.8 million thrown at fixing the system, finally admitting that in fact they had failed in attempting to implement the national business register. This was on top of the $125 million they had already spent on it. But, as we will always see, it is a coalition government that has at its heart the interests of small business operators. When I talk to my small business operators, they long for a change of government on 14 September.

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