Hello, thank you for having me here with you today.
I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we meet, the Whadjuk Noongar people and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and continuing connection to land, waters and community.
So first of all let me say I am super‑duper incredibly excited and honoured to be taking on the role of Minister for Small Business and to be here today as my first official engagement.
I’m going to start by telling you a story. So in my later teens and in my early 20s, I actually lived in Egypt after being raised in Australia. Egypt is the country of my birth, it’s where my parents migrated from when they came to Australia. In Egypt they have these things called dukkans, right? And dukkans are like – they’re pretty much tiny little shop fronts where Egyptians sell their wares and it can be anything from local delicacies, street foods and something called fakhfakhina – I don’t know if you can say it you can try it with me, fakhfakhina.
Now, fakhfakhina is – some people will tell you it’s a fruit salad, but it’s literally like this freshly squeezed juice that has a layer of banana and then a layer of mango and then sugar cane and then it’s topped with strawberries. And it was my favourite juice and my daily ritual for me to grab one – okay maybe sometimes 2 if I’m being honest – to and from my way to university.
When I came back I came back to Australia at the age of 21, pretty heavily pregnant and with this scathingly brilliant idea to bring the fakhfakhina to Australia. I researched it, I worked out a business plan, and I looked for possible venues where I could set up and market this freshly squeezed juice. But obviously I never did it. Obviously, I never did it. Why? Because as a young mum and with no support, no mentor, no access to advice it was all just too hard. And my dream was quietly filed away in the back of my mind along with a dozen or so other great ideas that I had to start my business.
I had an idea of a clothing line – get this ladies this is a really good one – a clothing line called No Hardware. That doesn’t use zippers, or buckles or buttons to do up. I got that idea because when you travel who is there to do your zipper? Right? A clothing brand called No Hardware. Some argan oil products, camel milk chocolate, but one that I did start was crochet bags, it’s called, I have my own label, it’s called Lost Flowers – but I do that to raise charity for domestic violence.
So instead of starting the fakhfakhina business, I threw myself into motherhood, I survived domestic violence, I became struggling mum of 2. I went back to university, I worked in insecure low‑paid work to keep a roof over the heads of myself and my children, eventually completing my PhD becoming a world‑renowned scholar and advisor to the United Nations on terrorism. Quite a world away from where I started.
So I do sometimes think about all of those ideas and aspirations that took up quite a lot of space actually, a lot of space in my head back then. And I can say with absolute certainty that if I had access to a community, a community of entrepreneurial women, mentors, inspirational stories of success, my life may have taken a very different turn and the fakhfakhina would be as Aussie as a meat pie with sauce.
Now, I did eventually actually set up my own small business as a consultant. And I also established a charitable organisation called Pave to mentor young people and harness their ingenuity and their lived experiences to develop local solutions to global issues through a series of hackathons, a program of hackathons, much like the kick starter challenge often an opportunity for them to pitch an idea and then get funding to implement the idea.
I’m really proud of where we’ve come so far in this country in recognising, supporting and promoting opportunities for women, entrepreneurs through programs just like this and it’s so great to see, just to look out and see you all and to actually feel the atmosphere in this room. Can you feel it? You can pretty much touch the atmosphere in this room.
Now, of course though Australian women have always been enterprising. They’ve always been enterprising. Think back to the 1800s. The 1800s, what was often referred to as cottage industries or side gigs, but that actually made an incredibly important economic contribution not just for women and for their families but also for their communities. Often downplayed as egg money or pin money as it was called or nest money, the market value of those enterprises was actually undervalued and never fully realised. The role of women in the market.
In 1990, Forbes magazine featured the most shocking front page. Madonna – clad in a hot pink costume embellished with rhinestone dollar signs and a headline: ‘America’s smartest business woman?’ Today we think about women like Perth’s own Melanie Perkins, who started Canva in her parent’s living room. And what started as a solution that she needed to designing and printing a poster grew in to a multi‑billion dollar business, and of course Janine Allis who started Boost Juice at her kitchen bench as a 32 year old mother of 3 children. But still no fakhfakhina. Just saying. There’s still space for the fakhfakhina.
Small businesses are so often the corner stones of communities right across Australia. They provide jobs, they develop services, they drive innovation and productivity, they contribute revenue, and they help define and support the local identity.
And yet when you think about small businesses it’s so diverse. There’s sole traders, hobbies turned in to earners like my crochet for example, family operated business, partnerships, trusts, incorporated and unincorporated entities. Whatever they and wherever they are, our government is committed to backing small business.
In the previous parliamentary term, the government committed more than $2 billion in targeted supports for small business and up to $800 in energy bill relief. We’ve committed to delivering competition policy with measures that will increase competition and productivity for small business and for the broader Australian economy and our effective national competition policy and long lasting productivity reform is designed to lift small business dynamism, innovation and productivity.
Importantly we are cutting red tape because that can be a big pain in the patooty, let me just say. And we are doing that by developing national screening check for workers in the care sector, adopting overseas standards to make it easier for Australian businesses, streamlining commercial planning and zoning and removing barriers that inhibit the take up of modern construction methods. All of that is backed by $900 million national productivity fund with real benefits for small business. We’re prioritising fair and equitable operating environments to level the playing field for small business, including franchises. And we’re helping more businesses grow, invest and prosper by extending the $20,000 instant asset write off for another 12 months.
Now I know that small businesses operate in pretty complex environments and nobody understands the challenges of working within and between different levels of government, federal, state and local, more than a small business owner. And that’s why we’re trying to make it easier for working with state and territory governments including the WA Government to streamline some of those processes. We have a landmark National Small Business Strategy that we’ve developed with the states and territories, it’s the first of its kind. And that outlines how the tiers of government can work together to better support small business no matter what stage of the operating cycle they’re in whether that’s in the form of concept or start up or growing or competing or innovating or maturing.
Now here are some interesting facts for you. Around 35 per cent of small businesses in Australia are owned by women. Yay. That figure actually continues to grow, the number of female‑owned small businesses in Australia increased by 24 per cent between 2006 and 2021. More than 3 times the growth of businesses owned by men.
So the latest figures available in WA tell us that there were over 247,000 small businesses in 23–24 which represents about 96.8 per cent of all businesses in WA. 96.8 per cent of all businesses in WA are small businesses and around 35 per cent of those are owned by women and growing at an exponential rate much more than businesses that are owned by men. And, many of those are owned by women from migrant backgrounds and actually across Australia around 40 per cent of small business owners are migrants. In WA it’s slightly higher, it’s around 41.2 per cent. And nearly 20 per cent of those business operators speak a language that is not English at home. Now I think that’s an incredible statistic and a real reason to celebrate the diversity of our small business community.
It’s a story for me as also the Minister for Multicultural Affairs but also as a migrant myself, albeit with the fantastic idea of fakhfakhina – that never happened. There’s still time. It’s a story about valuing multiculturalism in terms of the economic contribution of small businesses and a much broader contribution multicultural small businesses made to Australian society. Whether it’s your local MGM grocery, your brow beautician – threading. That was another idea of mine by the way I just wanted to say. In Egypt, women have been threading for centuries. Your henna artist at the weekend markets, or even the next big thing in renewable energy.
Women in business and entrepreneurship are as aspirational as they are inspirational. Now as you go forward in your small business ventures and your journeys, take time. Take time to celebrate each of your firsts. You know, I often say that sometimes we are so busy looking through the front windscreen that we don’t take time to look in the rear view mirror, to see where we’ve come from.
So take time as you go through your journey to celebrate those firsts, no matter how big or small you think they are. Maybe it’s when your website goes live, or maybe it’s your first sale. Every single accomplishment is an accomplishment. And every single barrier that you bulldoze is another barrier out the way. Honour each one of those firsts and think about each one of those firsts also coming in honour of the women whose shoulders you stand on. The women who paved the way for you. The women in this room who lift you up as we lift each other up in our ventures and as we move forward. The women in whose footsteps you follow and the women who will follow in your footsteps as well. Because each and every one of those firsts, each and every one of those gains, each and every one of those wins, is another step forward for all of us, every single one of us.
It’s been a privilege to talk to this room full of trail blazers. I wish you all the best of luck as you forge your own bright futures and I look forward to the day when we can all share a fakhfakhina.