I hope the Mark Arbib, the new minister for Small Business in Australia, is good for small business. he follows a procession of Small Business ministers who have failed to serve small business. Arbib’s small amount of small business experience apparently includes a job at Sizzler where he organised employees to fight for penalty rates.
I hope that Arbib does good things for small business. With Coles and Woolworths getting bigger, landlords pushing more costs onto small retailers and employee costs rising, something has to give is Australia is to have a growing small business sector.
You only have to look at who sits on government advisory boards and who is invited to important occasions, celebrations and conferences to see that this government is like the last and cow-tows to big business.
Mark Arbib has an opportunity to do genuinely good things for small business, to make a real difference. We will know soon enough if he has the will and permission to do this.
There have been enough studies and reports in recent years on matters relating to and affecting small business for him to have a reasonable list from which he can pull together an agenda … if he chooses.
Here’s what I’d like to see Arbib prosecute on behalf of small business:
- Genuine fairness in retail tenancy for small business – driven by greater transparency on terms. The current arrangement sees, I suspect, small retailers funding the deals of some of the national retailers.
- Fairer employment terms reflecting the seven day a week nature of retail.
- The Federal Government getting out of running a retail network go government owned Post Offices which compete directly with small business.
- A tax break for capital investment by small business, especially for business productivity tools.
- A plan to eliminate payroll tax.
I am sure there is more. Not that it matters as past Small Business ministers have shown. Hopefully this guy is different.
Which one is most important to small business? Fix on one and encourage a good chunck of small business owners to lobby their MP. If Australian MPs are like those in the UK they are to busy (or is it that their brains are to small) to manage more than one issue at a time.
UK retailers know any to well that political parties in opposition say one thing when they are not in power, but feel constrained from action if they become the Government.
Good luck.
He looks like he can pull a rabbit out of a hat. Hopefully, he can pull small retailers out the mess (over taxed, more red tape than Bunnings, cash cow for landlords, slaves to employees, etc etc) that we’re in?
I believe in MAGIC.
All I want for Christmas is for small business to have access to the unfair contract legislation that is available to our customers. I’d love the ability to have some access to legislation that would permit me to stand up to big business.
The thing is Luke, we choose this for ourselves. We have to be accountable for our own situations.
I would like to be optimistic regarding Mark Arbib appointment however their does not seem to be any serious reform or legislative work that I am aware of in the short term.
Ms Gillard ad libbed to indicate her Minister will promote new start up business’s which I can only assume are to replace the poor business that have closed dues to a variety of reasons, the main being financial due to some of the examples mentioned in the above posts.
I am of the opinion that the government have interwoven the Taxpayer and micro small business which really means nothing is going to be done in a hurry.
How can Mark Arbib say “Australia’s more than 2 million small businesses keep the economy ticking over and keep Australians employed. They are at the heart of Labor’s economic policy and I will do everything I can to represent them in the parliament,” he told The Australian.” with the workload that he has been allocated.
This decision is a very bad one, our Federal Parliament now with 22 Portfolio’s? could not even manage to dedicate an individual minister for Small Business. If they were smart they would start looking at small business now because when the Minerals cash cow reduces over time small business could be on a solid footing, alas I fear more of the same, that is why I agree with Marks post #4 because the Government is a generation behind on where it should be on small business. We must continue our own breakthroughs until somebody in Government realises “Housten we have a problem”.
The “more red tape than Bunnings” comment made me choke on my coffee !
Two weeks ago or more, we were directed by fairfax to set up our Bunnings as a resale agent for our local paper, 20 copies a day. Monday came and went, Tuesday morning, a phone call from Bunnings to enquire why we were giving them these papers. We explained we’d been directed to by ffx. On Wednesday Bunnings asked us to stop giving them then papers because they had barcodes on them that weren’t in their system, and they couldn’t resell the papers until it was all set up their end (but not on site, by ? head office?) Since then, nothing.
No doubt it will all be set up some time in 2012 but once again we will have yet another tiny sub-agent where the earnings do not cover newsagent costs, (like the 3 teles a day for Gloria Jean’s). Mr Arbib is far more beholden to Ffx and Bunnings than he is to me, so I expect nothing from him as a minister.
Nick sherry was looking at a national system to resolve small business disputes. Where has this gone and will habib continue to look into this as this is much needed.