Page 1838 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 June 2021
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is not an island; it is part of a region. Many interstate residents work and spend money in Canberra and it made no sense to exclude them from this scheme when the intention was to increase spends at Canberra businesses.
A common comment has also been about the distribution of the vouchers and that it was inequitable. Again, this was a program designed to stimulate spending in Canberra businesses. It was not a program designed with vouchers for everyone. We committed at the election that it would be $2 million dollars for the full rollout. You can easily see that this would have been a very small discount amount per Canberran and it would not have met the scheme’s aims of encouraging Canberrans to explore more and to spend more in store.
I understand that Canberrans were shocked at the rate and speed of take-up, especially those Canberrans who had planned how to spend their vouchers and were not able to. I know there were high expectations and many Canberrans were and are disappointed that they were not able to use a voucher. But it was simply not designed so that every Canberran would get a discount; it was designed to stimulate spending.
We were as transparent as we possibly could be about the voucher take-up, redemption rates and even announcing that the vouchers were available once the website relaunched, all so Canberrans could make informed decisions about when to use their vouchers.
The scheme has also been compared to the New South Wales scheme, which has 4 x $25 vouchers and is integrated into the Service NSW app. I have already explained why ours was not integrated in that way. One of my major concerns about the New South Wales scheme is that the vouchers may not necessarily provide extra stimulus; there is no extra spend required on the consumer’s part. They may spend the $25 or less and that is it. In the ACT the scheme it meant at least double was being spent every time a voucher was used.
Where people have commented that our scheme was too generous, I note that the New South Wales scheme has seen low take-up and that it has had to be extended. It will be for others to determine why this is, but it may be due to the voucher amounts. In Canberra, businesses told me that they did not participate in the trial, because the voucher values and discounts were too low for their type of business, but the revised scheme meant it was attractive to them and their customers. Again, this speaks to that value proposition being strong for businesses and customers to participate and engage being strong. We wanted to ensure the funding was getting to businesses.
In response to reports about customer registration, anyone over the age of 18 was able to participate in the ChooseCBR program. When they registered, customers needed to submit a unique email address and mobile phone number and confirm it by submitting a one-time password sent to them via text message. It may have been possible that a person may have registered with more than one email account if they also had access to more than one mobile phone. We have no way of verifying this. But given the value of the program and the effort an individual would have to go to, this risk was considered to be low. It would be disappointing if what has been alleged was true, as this is absolutely not within the spirit of the program. But it is worth stressing that
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