Page 783 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016

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MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (3.53): I thank Mr Hanson for the opportunity to speak on small business today. I will spend a couple of minutes just giving one case study that shows that if everything Dr Bourke has said were not so tragic it would be laughable. Dr Bourke, who likes to say that he has a great understanding of small business, had better listen up to what is happening to small businesses in this town. I will give you one example.

I have a mechanic. He has been my mechanic and my family’s mechanic for about 15 years. A while ago, about five years ago, with the assistance of the Motor Trades Association and with the agreement of the ACT authorities, he set up a home business in his double garage under his house in a Weston Creek suburb. He runs an impeccable business. Madam Assistant Speaker, you will turn up to put your car in to have it serviced and there are a couple of cars in the driveway. You turn up to visit them after hours and you would not know that they were operating a car repair shop from their garage. The place is immaculate.

I turned up about three weeks ago to have my shock absorbers fixed after I hit a pothole in the ACT caused by lack of repair. As it turned out, I turned up in time to see my mechanic being visited by someone from Access Canberra to say that they had had a complaint about the operation of his business. I was interested, so I stood around for a while. I was actually waiting for one of the members of my family to come and give me a lift, to pick me up. I stood there and listened to this conversation for a while. People from Access Canberra were very polite and they did make the point to my mechanic and his wife, who is the business manager, that they had no intention of closing them down but that there had been complaints and they had to investigate the complaints. I watched as the members of the staff from Access Canberra measured up the workshop. Yes, it did comply with the rules. Yes, they had the right number of employees on the site. There was an issue that maybe their signs were not in quite the right area, but when we looked at that, that was not a problem either.

Since then, I have had a number of conversations with my mechanic and his wife, who is the business manager. They have received about four different lots of ambiguous communication from Access Canberra that say, “Look, your business is fine. You do everything by the book. But it would be better if you have a DA.” I went through the rules in relation to setting up a home business and I went through the guidelines. They say that to be code exempt, that is, to be in the code track and therefore to be exempt from a DA, you have to be able to answer yes to various questions. I went through these myself, and I went through them with my mechanic and his wife. They can answer yes to every one of those questions. They comply absolutely and completely with the guidelines in every case.

Last week, they went to have a pre-DA conversation where they were told things like, “Look, there’s nothing really wrong with your business, but it would be easier in the long run if you had a DA. It will cost you a few hundred dollars but we can’t tell you what it will cost you.” And this was the real doozy: “We’re thinking of changing the policy. If you get in now and get a DA, you’ll be safe for five years.” These are almost exact words: “We’re on your side at the moment, but if you don’t have a DA and things might change, we may not be on your side.”


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