​Business Minister backflips as ChooseCBR debacle continues

 

The Business Minister’s ChooseCBR backflip over releasing the names of retailers who claimed the most vouchers shows again the scheme has been a shambles and raises some serious questions.

When asked only days ago to release this information, the Business Minister refused saying the list was ‘commercial in confidence’.

Shadow Business Minister Leanne Castley said the ‘Top 100’ business list was clearly not commercial-in-confidence and accused the Minister of ducking and weaving around the ChooseCBR mess from day one.

“The Minister has misled the Canberra community,” Ms Castley said.

“The list raises more serious questions which can only be properly answered by the Labor-Greens Government calling in the Auditor-General.

“The Auditor-General must scrutinise the entire scheme, in particular transactions that took place over a 25 hour period.

“We know from the trial that three businesses had questionable transactions with a total voucher value of $6156 but the government did not recover the money as it would have been too costly.

The Business Minister this week admitted people could have accessed multiple vouchers which casts serious doubt over the integrity of the scheme.

“ChooseCBR had such a low take-up; less than 20 per cent of eligible businesses participated, only 797 out of 4000,” Ms Castley said.

“That is a huge small business vote of no-confidence in ChooseCBR. More than four in five eligible businesses did not bother signing up," Ms Castley concluded.