Page 3390 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 19 August 2009

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The ACT government also provides for younger businesspeople with the creating youth business initiative. This program helps young, unemployed entrepreneurs to establish successful, sustainable businesses and achieve personal and financial independence.

“Lighthouse—unleashing your innovation potential” was an initiative of last year’s budget and is a joint initiative between the ACT government and the Canberra private sector. The centre is being positioned to attract both high growth businesses and early stage investment opportunities from existing local industry, research institutions and individual entrepreneurs in ICT and creative design.

I would also like to mention just a few examples of other assistance programs available for the ACT business sector. The ACT Business Licence Information Service lets the private sector deal with the government through a single point of access and provides a quick, convenient way to find the complete range of business licences, registration, permits and approvals needed to set up a business in Canberra.

The Business Reference Service is provided by ACT Libraries and focuses on the provision of information services to small businesses in the ACT region. The new exporter development program is designed to assist small and medium sized companies develop their businesses overseas and make their first export sale. The program is offered through Austrade and TradeStart as a package of free services.

Madam Deputy Speaker, as you can see, it is a fairly rich program environment. Of course, it could be said that there are other things that we could do, but the fact remains that this government is supporting an array of well-conceived and effective programs to services and businesses.

I would like to draw to the attention of the Assembly the consultative forum announced by the Chief Minister’s Department. That will be on 16 September, and I encourage all small and micro businesses to be aware of that.

Finally, I would like to inform the Assembly that the ACT government promoting this September as business in focus month. Around 70 business events are being run through September in a partnership model with business, community and its organisations. We hope that Canberra businesses will take part, take a break from the daily grind and hook up to one of the events, all of which have been conceived to give businesses some tips, ideas and new networks to take them to the next level.

MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.08): I thank Ms Burch for launching this own goal and highlighting the fact that, of course, this is just another backflip by the Stanhope-Gallagher government concerning small and micro businesses in the ACT. Ms Burch probably did not know, or somebody upstairs did not tell her when they framed this motion, that we used to have a Small and Micro Business Advisory Council until the government abolished it. Yes, we had this, but the government said, “We don’t need these sorts of things.” It is probably some of that business welfare that Mr Barr is so averse to handing out. But in the disastrous budget that was launched in 2006—


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