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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-09-08 Daily Xml
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Question Time

Office for Small and Family Business

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:51): My question is to the Minister for Small and Family Business. Can the minister provide an update on the establishment of the Office for Small and Family Business and current engagement activities that are underway?

The Hon. A. MICHAELS (Enfield—Minister for Small and Family Business, Minister for Consumer and Business Affairs, Minister for Arts) (14:51): Thank you to the member for Adelaide for that question and it's fantastic to have a local member who is so passionate about her small and family businesses in her community.

In fact, over the winter break I got to spend about half a day doing business visits with the member for Adelaide around Hutt Street and Prospect Road, which was a fantastic time talking to some of those business owners and seeing how they progressed through COVID and where they are up to at the moment. A lot of those were in hospitality and retail and obviously had some struggles through COVID, but their resilience was outstanding and they are taking on new opportunities and expanding. There are really some great positive stories out there.

A few weeks ago, over the winter break, I launched the Office for Small and Family Business at Mixed Goods at Kilkenny, which was an exciting time. It will be a single destination point for small businesses to interact with the state government, not only as a central port of call but also providing services to help support small and family businesses across the state.

The first big job I have tasked that office with is creating a small business strategy for the state. As far as the department can tell me, this is the first small business strategy that they can find any details of. That's an exciting piece of comprehensive work that they are doing at the moment. As with any business, the best way to know what you should be doing is to ask your customers, so that's what we are doing, asking our small businesses and family businesses what they want this Office for Small and Family Business to do and what we want this small business strategy to look like for the state.

That engagement piece is quite extensive. There is an online survey at survey.business.sa.gov.au and I encourage all members, if they are interested in connecting with their local businesses, to participate in that survey. We have had more than 500 responses already, which the office is quite happy with for their statistical database. So we will be getting quantitative and qualitative results from that.

Also, very importantly, we have almost 20 round tables set up across the state. We are having a CBD one, four metropolitan ones and some across the regions starting next week through Port Augusta, Port Pirie and Whyalla when country cabinet is out there. That is a really good way to have very detailed conversations with these small businesses to get from them what they need from the state government. I am really thrilled to be able to do that. It is a really good way to engage with small businesses. We have those happening at the moment across the state.

We are also going through sectors. Building and construction, food and hospitality and tourism are some of our key industry sectors throughout the state. We are engaging in specific round tables for them as well to get their feedback to really mould what the Office for Small and Family Business does in terms of support services and how businesses can interact better with the state government, and also to be able to form that small business strategy and to roll out all our policies as a state government over the next 3½ years.

This is one of the largest engagement processes we have had with the small business sector as a state government, from my memory, so it is a really great way to hear from these businesses in terms of what their support strategies will be and how we progress further, and being able to really pin down some of those support services in terms of basic business fundamentals, networking and all those support services that can really work well within some of the industry associations.

I want to thank all the industry associations that have engaged with me since becoming the minister to feed into this process of creating the office and where we go forward, as well as spreading the word on this engagement piece. It has been fantastic to have the support of groups like Business SA and other groups helping us with that process.

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