Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's an honour to rise today and speak in favour of this motion and about how it relates my great electorate of Braddon on the north-west and west coasts and King Island in Tasmania. My electorate is home to a number of small to medium businesses that are significant on a global scale. It is also home to around 9½ thousand small businesses that add to Tasmania's positive GDP growth. All of Braddon's great businesses are playing a critical role in driving our economy forward. These small businesses provide the engine room of our economy in Tasmania.

As a small business owner myself I understand the challenges and risks that business sectors face each and every day. I understand what it's like to borrow too much money and to have to employ people week in, week out and ensure that they are gainfully employed through slack periods in one's business. I understand the burden of compliance and the levels of bureaucracy that are placed around small businesses and that sometimes appear critical and crippling to those small-business operators.

In my first speech in this place, I said that this was a particular issue I wanted to fight and support. I made a commitment to my electorate and to those small to medium business owners that I would do everything I could to ensure that those businesses right across Australia, including those in Braddon, are given the room to grow, the room to expand, to flourish and to employ more people and create even more jobs. As a small business man I understand and I value the efficiencies and the streamlined processes within government departments. I also understand that reducing the regulatory burdens imposed on businesses allows them to focus on what's important to them, which is running their business. They've got enough to do, running their own show, without worrying about government bureaucracy and interdepartmental glitches.

We need to think about the human side and how these regulatory burdens stifle business growth—how they impact those mum-and-dad businesses on the ground. Once again, they've got enough to do, running their own show, without having to worry about red and green tape. I know that most nights most mums and dads who run these businesses are locked away in their home offices, trying to negotiate through unnecessary and complex bureaucratic paperwork, instead of spending precious time with their kids and their families and instead of looking after themselves and their own wellbeing. That's why this legislation is important.

The Commonwealth Registers Bill 2019 and associated bills fulfil the government's 2018-19 budget commitment to reduce regulatory burdens imposed on businesses. Currently there are 34 legal registers that are administered by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Business Register. These registers include but are not limited to the entity name, identity and information; registers of banned or disqualified persons; business name registers; managed investment scheme registers; and registers of disqualified company directors—just to name a few.

Another inefficiency with the current system is that business owners often have to provide the same information time and time again. It does their head in. The duplicative nature of going to one department and explaining your life, only to have to go to another department, must cripple businesses and their confidence. Amongst other things, it certainly would frustrate them. This is because 32 existing registers aren't linked, despite them holding exactly the same information and data. This is an issue that business owners in Braddon raise with me almost daily. It's frustrating, it's time-wasting and it costs the business owner their bottom line. It's nonsensical.

The bill addresses this problem and will integrate the current 32 business registers into one single, efficient platform. The Morrison government is one that delivers on its promises and does what is needed to streamline how businesses engage with government, and this is important on so many levels. This bill modernises business registers to address registry fragmentation and improves business user experience. Protecting Braddon's small businesses from unscrupulous company directors is also important to me. As a former company director I understand this full well, as does the Morrison government. I've listened to the advice from the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals and I've heard firsthand the examples they provide of this unscrupulous aspect creeping into boards of directors, only to have this fall into the lap of honest, hardworking folk who are getting about this business every day.

Loopholes that allow current corrupt company directors to avoid paying what they owe to our honest, hardworking business owners by shutting down their debt ridden companies and transferring their assets to another company must be closed. It's estimated that the cost to Australian businesses and to the economy as a result of this dishonest practice is between $2.9 billion and $5 billion annually. But what this dishonest practice does in terms of destroying business confidence, and those hardworking folk that run these businesses, is immeasurable. We can't measure the burden that that places on them.

With this in mind, I welcome the introduction of the director identification number, the DIN. The DIN is a unique identifier that a director will keep forever. This means that going forward a director's profile and relationships across companies will be traceable. This will provide greater insights to regulators, to businesses and to individuals to identify affiliated directors and prevent them from fictitious identities. It will also provide a means by which we can control unscrupulous fiduciary requirements being mislaid or not carried out on the part of company directors. This acts as further deterrent—to detect and address unlawful behaviour. It protects our small business operators. This will result in yet another important protection for our businesses right across the electorate of Braddon, and, in fact, right across Australia, and for that I commend this bill to the House.

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