Wednesday, 18 March 2026

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (18:31): (2427) My adjournment matter for the Minister for Small Business and Employment concerns the Auditor-General’s report Timely Payments Performance tabled today. As Shadow Minister for Small Business, I want to make Victoria the best place in Australia to do business. The first improvement should be the government paying its bills on time. They do say the right thing. They even changed the rules. Under the fair payment policy agencies must pay invoices for contracts under $3 million within 10 business days, with penalty interest for late payments. But as ever with Labor, that is where it ended – the announcement, the Facebook post, the piece in the paper. In reality nearly one in five invoices covered by the policy were paid late last year from 1.4 million invoices worth $9.6 billion. For a small business a late government payment is not a filing error; it is a missed payroll or an angry landlord.

Worse, the Auditor-General casts doubt even on the 81.5 per cent claimed compliance, finding the publicly reported data neither complete nor accurate. The Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions and the Victorian Small Business Commission, the very bodies responsible for this policy, do not check the data agencies provide. They just publish it and hope no-one checks. Some individual findings beggar belief. In the last financial year Museums Victoria took an average of 38 days to pay suppliers – only 22 per cent within the 10-day limit. The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing admits up to 71 per cent of its transactions have incorrect receipt dates. These are systems failures, not administrative oversights. Labor wrote the rules, they broke the rules and now the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office has shown nobody was even checking whether the numbers add up. In question time today the Treasurer told me she had not read the report. It is no wonder the bills are not getting paid. CFMEU mates and dodgy operators get looked after while honest small businesses are left chasing their own money. The Allan Labor government already makes it harder for small business than anywhere else in the country. Crushed by taxes, drowning in regulation, hit by retail crime, struggling through a cost-of-living crisis, the last thing they need is their biggest customer treating invoices as optional extras. What I ask for, Minister, is an independent compliance audit of all 39 agencies under the fair payment policy in a public report and for the results to be released within six months.