Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

'Shadow'; sorry. I was jumping ahead there.

Mr Bowen interjecting—

Did I say that? My apologies, shadow Treasurer. I thought I had called you 'Treasurer' by mistake. The shadow Treasurer—I almost did it again—has already said that we will cooperate with the government in these areas—and that is very fine thing.

My criticism of the government in relation to this bill is that it has taken an extraordinary length of time. In the world that we are dealing with, speed actually does matter. This legislation is something that the start-up community has wanted for some time; it is something that the Labor opposition committed to supporting back in March last year. So we are actually a year down the track now. I hope that when the government deals with crowdfunding, which it says it is going talk about it, it is a little faster than it has been in this area. They are not the only two areas. We have also got Fintech and a whole range of other new ways of funding activity that are emerging and which this parliament needs to deal with and deal with them as quickly as it can in a bipartisan way and accept that flexibility will be required as the world changes.

I was reading up on crowdfunding again the other day. I have been following it for quite a while. Not only have I been following it for quite a while; but I have probably been doing it for about 30 years. It is amazing how sometimes new ideas are not that new. Back in the music world we used to regularly crowdfund CDs. If you were into really niche music, where a band would release maybe 500 copies of a CD at the most—and 300 of them would stay under their bed—which I was, the only way that you could get those CDs was to buy one a year before they made them. I remember I once bought a CD from a group called Mind Body Split—Rik Rue, Sherre De Lys and Jim Denley—which were a really interesting group of musicians back in the late eighties and early nineties. I bought it at least a year before it was released. All their fans basically crowdfunded their recordings, and that was quite common. So it is amazing sometimes how a good idea comes into its time.

There is an incredible amount of work to do by this parliament in those areas, and I would urge the government to take advantage of the bipartisan approach to the need to do that and to take action as quickly as possible. It is a welcome amendment, as I said, if not a little bit later than it could have been. It is not finished yet. I think various sectors still have issues, so there is more work to be done. But I am very pleased to stand up and speak to this bill, because it is a bill that is a maker of space.

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