Page 3396 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 19 August 2009
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I believe that there are in the order of 30,000 small and micro businesses in the ACT, so it is a really major part of our employment base. Most private sector businesses in the ACT are small; I think about 90 per cent of them qualify as small businesses. In thinking about this, it is always good to remember that small businesses are really important also because they tend to be where innovation comes from. We all know that the bigger an organisation is the more bureaucratic it becomes and the harder it sometimes is to have new ideas get out. That is where small business is so incredibly important in an economy and a society—because small business is what drives innovation and what drives change.
Some of the smaller businesses we have are spin-offs from ANU. Some of the brilliant ideas they have had have turned into small businesses. Some of them have now turned into big businesses. I imagine it is the same with the University of Canberra.
The other thing about small businesses, particularly as many of them are home based and they usually have the proprietor working in the business, is that they tend to be very family friendly. When you are working for yourself, you organise your hours around all your commitments, including your family. And when you are a small business, you are like a family and you tend to be the most family-friendly part of our business community.
Mr Smyth mentioned in his speech—I think it was in response to Mr Barr’s interjection, to be precise about it—that in the past small businesses became particularly important because of redundancies. I do not want to suggest that there will be any, but if the global financial crisis continues it is possible that small business, for that reason, will become important again.
But enough of all these positives. I want to also talk about something that the government is doing in terms of small business. I want to talk about the ACT supermarket competition policy review. The first thing I would like to say is that what we found very disappointing about this review was that it concentrated—I suppose inevitably, given the name—on competition. The Greens are not saying for one minute that competition is not important. It is important; we are in a capitalist competitive economy. But competition is not the only thing. We found it quite surprising that the review did not include the impacts on local shops. Once small businesses move out of the home, they move into local shops. The competition policy did not look at the impact on local shops and communities.
And there are other comments on this. The competition policy was looking at the impact of the current supermarket grocery policy on competition and various players. We are of the opinion that the current supermarket policy definitely favours larger operators and does not support independent operators to supply a larger diversity of goods. We believe that it is important to maintain vibrant local shops, because they are the heart of suburbs and communities. It is also a bit distressing to find what is happening in many shopping centres. You have small, innovative shops there, but as they become successful they get wiped out by bigger, non-local firms. That is happening in many areas.
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