TRANSCRIPT
Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Bruce Billson interview with Leon Delaney.
2CC Canberra
Subject: Low cost support to help small businesses resolve disputes and the Small Business Pulse
Leon Delaney
The Federal Government has announced that there will be more a funding made available for low-cost support to help small and family businesses resolve disputes. This announcement has been welcomed by the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Bruce Billson, good afternoon.
Bruce Billson
Leon, fab to be with you, and I hate to be cantankerous to begin with - no more funding, just an expansion of what we can use existing funding for.
Leon Delaney
Oh, they have misled me.
Bruce Billson
I also thought, wow this is great news. We run a very lean operation as a nano agency, and we have a pool of funds that's called administered funds, which your APS listeners would know is funds able to be used for a particular policy purpose.
Up until now, we've had to concentrate on disputes with the tax office, where we could use that funding to provide subsidised legal advice. So people knew the ground they stood on and how to engage – we’re now able to extend that to a broader range of disputes.
Leon Delaney
Okay, well, that's good news. But when I saw the government's press release, I think it was yesterday, I distinctly had the impression that they were telling us how much better off we'd all be. Look there we go, if they've given you more powers to help small business operators, that's a good thing, right?
Bruce Billson
Well, it's good because you know that we just recently celebrated our 50,000th business that came to us for help and at times disputes, whether it's payment times or your favourite topic, digital platform providers or some dispute over whether contract obligations have been fulfilled – going to court is no option for a small business that can't afford it and they want it sorted out more quickly. That's where we get involved by providing help and tools to resolve disputes.
But if it gets to the point where we organise mediation, you want the parties to know the ground that they stand on. You want them to be well prepared so they can get the best out of that exchange. And hopefully bring a resolution mindset, get the matter resolved, keep relationships intact where we can and get back to business.
Leon Delaney
Yeah, absolutely. All right so it's a small piece of good news, but not quite as bright as I had previously thought, because I didn't bother to read the fine print in the press release.
Bruce Billson
Look, it's always sunny when there's more help for small business, because right now, things are pretty challenging out there. And some businesses would know where there's power imbalances.
There's often industry codes that try and make sure a big party plays nice with a smaller party, that can often end up in a dispute, and there's nothing worse than being, say, a small petrol station operator having a ‘blue’ with an oil company, and you go into the mediation and the oil company’s geared up with all the horsepower you could possibly imagine and the petrol station owner is thinking ‘well, what do I do now?’ We are actually able to help them prepare better for that kind of moment.
Leon Delaney
Now, of course, at the end of last week, you released your latest small business pulse report and just looking at the graph on the front page of this, it looks like somebody's, well, that looks like they're in need of intensive care. It looks like, that the chart has taken a turn for the worse, does that tell the story?
Bruce Billson
Yes, it shows that during COVID, which were challenging times - governments, banks, landlords - there were a lot of people providing a lot of help and support for small business and as challenging as the times were, it was a reasonably well supported time for small and family enterprises. And what we do is we track 3 broad things, one - what's the economy doing? So that's hard data you get from the ABS annual accounts, those sorts of things.
Sentiment - how are those animals spirits feeling? There's a lot of firms out there that conduct surveys, but we go to the next step and say, ‘what are businesses actually doing or contemplating because of the economic conditions and their sense of where things are going?’
We bring that together in this world leading small business pulse that ASBFEO produces every 3 months. It tracks, if you want, it's a health monitor on just what the ecosystem is like for small and family businesses.
It came off very dramatically at the end of COVID, not only because of the economic dislocation that COVID created but also a lot of the support that was out there to get people through COVID, well, that came off as well, so it got really quite challenging in that post-COVID era, it fell off pretty quickly.
It is thankfully flattening out, but it's not in a great place. And if you think as I do that small business is the engine room of the economy, if it was a four-cylinder economy, the pulse basically says we've lost a cylinder.
Leon Delaney
Yes, not the greatest of news, but hopefully things will be looking up in the not too distant future. Bruce, thanks very much for chatting today.
Bruce Billson
It's good to be with you, Leon and your listeners.
Leon Delaney
Thank you, Bruce Billson, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman and of course, that latest small business pulse report - the downturn in the chart that I was looking at takes place about 18 months ago in the second part of 2022, which is about when most of those support measures ran out and people had to make do with what they had.