Small Business Commissioner

The Hon. M.C. PARNELL (15:21): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Treasurer about telephone access to the Office of the Small Business Commissioner.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M.C. PARNELL: I have been contacted by a constituent who has expressed concern that a major communication method to the Office of the Small Business Commissioner has been shut down. As they said, if the staff are still working they should answer the phone. I note that when my team were working from home early on in the pandemic, our office number was diverted to the phone number for my office manager—it wasn't that hard to do. But on checking the Small Business Commissioner's website, it has a note on the homepage saying:

Due to the current COVID-19 situation, this office will be operating online only. Please email us…and we will contact you as soon as practicable. Alternatively you can contact us via the 'contact us' page on this website. We apologise for any inconvenience.

I looked at the contact page and I could find no telephone number there either. A Google search does bring up a telephone number, but when you ring it you get a recorded message telling you that due to COVID-19 the office has moved to a working-from-home system. It then invites you to email; and you cannot leave a message on that phone number.

My question of the Treasurer is: given the importance of small business to our state and given the impact of the COVID-19 health pandemic on small business, given the fact that the Office of the Small Business Commissioner is responsible for providing dispute resolution services in relation to retail and commercial tenancies, and given my understanding that the current advice from the government is that people should go back to work if they can, when will the Small Business Commissioner reopen their phone lines?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (15:23): The Small Business Commissioner reports to, I think, the Attorney-General or the Deputy Premier, so I am happy to take the question on notice. I must say that my experience of working with the Small Business Commissioner, particularly on the commercial tenancies legislation, is that he in particular is very accessible. I am unaware of this issue in relation to the general phone number, but I know on a number of occasions he has conveyed his own number to various constituents and undertaken to take calls from them directly on his phone or, indeed, for him to ring individual constituents in an endeavour to try to resolve what was a commercial leasing issue.

I certainly don't believe it's indicative of the general approach of the Small Business Commissioner that he seeks to closet himself away and be as inaccessible as possible. That has not been my experience, and I place on the record my thanks to him and his team for what they are doing during COVID-19 in relation to the complexities of COVID-19.

In relation to the specifics of the honourable member's question, I will certainly refer the issues to the Attorney-General or will take them up directly with the Small Business Commissioner and seek a response. I do believe that someone had advised me recently that the Small Business Commissioner might have been moving office, and I don't know whether that is in part caught up with the issue of telephone numbers at the moment. I don't know, but I can certainly clarify whether that is indeed the case or not.

In relation to the honourable member's contention: is it the government's current advice to encourage people back to operate from their work office, I think either as of late last week or early this week the Commissioner for Public Sector Employment (I believe) did send an email out to indicate that it now was the default position that we were encouraging public servants, wherever possible, to work from the office as opposed to, in the alternative, working from home, whilst acknowledging that people with vulnerabilities and others may well still choose to have to work from their home office environment. So the member is correct in relation to that part of the explanation.

I am happy to take the issue up but, as I said, my experience with the Small Business Commissioner has been entirely favourable in terms of his willingness to be accessible and it would surprise me that he and his team were trying to make it difficult for people to contact them, but I will take the issue up.