House of Assembly Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1) 55 1 Parliament of South Australia House of Assembly published Question Time Women in Business Women in Business Ms HOOD House of Assembly Adelaide Women in Business Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (15:04): My question is to the Minister for Small and Family Business. Can the minister inform the house how the state government is supporting women in business? The Hon. A. MICHAELS House of Assembly Enfield Minister for Small and Family Business Minister for Consumer and Business Affairs Minister for Arts Women in Business The Hon. A. MICHAELS (Enfield—Minister for Small and Family Business, Minister for Consumer and Business Affairs, Minister for Arts) (15:04): I thank the member for Adelaide for her question. As the member knows, the Malinauskas Labor government is very keen to support small and family businesses in South Australia and, in particular, to support female entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses in this state. It is something I am particularly passionate about, having started my own business at the start of 2015, a commercial law firm, which, after many years of being in a large commercial law firm, gave me the opportunity to run my own business. I was very well aware of the challenges I faced as a woman in business, as were also many of my clients, who were also female entrepreneurs. I know that some of the issues are around building your networks, upskilling opportunities, business fundamentals, access to capital and of course, as the member for Adelaide will know, the well-documented juggle of caring responsibilities and work, and that particularly comes to the forefront when you are running your own business. We have undertaken extensive consultation and rolled out the Women in Business program, which I am particularly proud of. In the consultation we have undertaken for the Office for Small and Family Business, we know that 40 per cent of female respondents right across the state still experience gender bias barriers, including some of the comments coming through about feeling they weren't being taken seriously as business owners and that their customers preferred dealing with men. Those issues are still coming through in the feedback that we are getting. We know that we need to make it easier to support female business owners to manage their finances and improve their financial literacy, improve their marketing skills and their digital literacy. All those issues are feeding through into the Women in Business program that we released last week. We had a recent Deloitte report commissioned by SBE Australia that found only 22 per cent of Australian startups are founded by women and, quite shockingly, only 0.7 per cent of funding secured by startups—0.7 per cent—went solely to female-owned companies. That is a shocking statistic that we need to work on. That same report showed that women founders who had networking and these sorts of program supports that we are offering in the Women in Business program were 1.4 times more likely to raise capital than other founders. Having looked at those challenges and those opportunities, and working that into our election commitment with $4 million for the Women in Business program over the next four years, last week, at a very successful launch on Tuesday, we announced the Women in Business program. We actually had to do a version 2 of that launch. The original one was partnering with the Port Adelaide Football Club through their Her Story business program, and we will be partnering with the Port Adelaide Football Club to run a number of leadership and networking events over the next 12 months. I want to thank them for their support, particularly for the launch last Tuesday. Our initial intent was to have 100 people at the Port Adelaide Football Club. That sold out in 15 minutes, which was remarkable. I want to thank Matthew Richardson for allowing us to move to a larger venue, where we had over 300 passionate women in the room talking about our program. We are running a foundations program, partnering up with the Adelaide Business Hub to support early stage business owners through mentoring and capability programs, and an advisory program that is being partnered with Behind Closed Doors to run that program for fast growing businesses to help them with their strategic planning governance and a whole range of other issues. The Port Adelaide Football Club have been a terrific partner to come on board with us with their AFLW team, and I look forward to rolling out that program further.