Almost half of small business operators have considered closing or leaving in the past twelve months, with the percentage even higher outside Australia’s capital cities, according to damning new survey data from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI).
In its new ACCI Small Business Survey, released Sunday, the representative group said traders are struggling through a difficult trading environment and what it described as a complex regulatory environment.
Some 45% of survey respondents said shutting up shop was a real consideration, with the percentage rising to 57% in regional and rural Australia.
While the cost pressures facing small businesses — spanning inflation, increased borrowing costs, and uncertain consumer spending — are a major concern, ACCI said traders are worried about red tape.
Some 82% of the survey’s 378 respondents said red tape had a moderate or major effect on their business.
“We’ve got to get to a situation where small business is able to get through that administrative burden much more effectively,” ACCI CEO Andrew McKellar told reporters in Canberra Sunday.
Of particular note were recent and incoming changes to the industrial relations landscape, including the new definition of casual employment and the right to disconnect.
“We’ve got to overcome those sorts of hurdles,” McKellar said.
“We’ve got to make it easier for people to run their own small business in this country.”
Incoming changes to the Privacy Act, exposing small businesses and startups to penalties if they mishandle customer data, are also on the radar: when asked to rate their readiness for those changes on a scale of one to ten, the average response was 4.6.
Concern over the complexity of those changes is not unique to ACCI.
The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, which counts small business representatives among its membership, has long argued against changes to the regulatory landscape it argues will make life more complex for local businesses.
To address some of those questions, it has also released Small Business Peak, a government-backed training platform that it says can equip small businesses with the information they need to navigate those reforms.
The full ACCI survey report is available here.
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