Labor’s revenge served cold on Bruce Billson

Former minister Bruce Billson.

Bruce Billson. Remember him? Former minister in the Abbott government and, more recently, Australia’s small business ombudsman – a job that pays (wait for it) $400,000 a year and was handed to him, without a whiff of any competitive process, by his Liberal mate Michaelia Cash. Nice work if you can get it – and Billson could. He created the bloody job!

Labor, naturally, lost their minds at his appointment. Called it “entirely inappropriate”, a “disregard for standards”. This was 2021, when Scott Morrison was in charge. By the time Anthony Albanese prised the PM from the Lodge a year later Billson was already cemented in place. Five years, it said in the contract. Immovable. Stuck there like a hereditary blotch.

But time flies when you’re on a six-figure salary funded by the taxpayer. Billson’s master in Canberra – Labor’s small business minister Anne Aly – wants him gone. She didn’t say as much, but there was a vibe, Billson said. A letter arrived a month ago telling him, politely, that his services would no longer be required.

“I would have liked the term renewed,” Billson added on Thursday. He was told to apply, but felt he shouldn’t. “The vibe was they were looking for someone new.”

Yes, the vibe. Except it isn’t a vibe; it’s revenge, served tepidly and late. Because Billson – this is dipping back into the history books – wrote this ombudsman job into legislation in 2016 when he was small business minister, shortly before retiring from politics. From there, he strode into a leadership role with Franchise Council of Australia. Incidentally, it had been paying him while he was still an MP. Not allowed. Gross failure of the pub test. And worse? Billson never declared it.

Labor’s Small Business Minister Anne Aly. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Parliament censured him for the oversight in 2018 and Labor never truly forgave him. Maybe they did. They’ve been bypassing his office on work that’s entirely within his remit, diverting it to chaps like Dr Michael Schaper and former Labor minister Dr Craig Emerson – the former got the Franchising Code of Conduct review, the latter the Payment Times Reporting Act (or, de-jargoned, the rules that govern how large businesses pay small businesses).

Which brings us to what now for Billson. We’re impeccably informed that he’s a candidate for the vacant role of CEO at the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, or COSBOA if syllables are your sworn enemy. Emma Alberici – yes, that one, formerly of the ABC – is running the headhunt via Derwent Search. She also happens to be running the search for Billson’s replacement at the ombudsman’s office. Never let it be said that Canberra is anything but the country’s shallowest pond.

We’ve seen the job requirements for this peak small business body. They were leaked to us and ostentatiously stamped by Derwent as “private and confidential” on every page. The role, it said, demands impeccable relationships with government. It’s also strictly Canberra-based (“this is non-negotiable”) so no Zooming in from Byron a la Damian Kassabgi. Billson lives in the region, so he’s good there; but he’ll probably have to prostrate himself before a few minor deities if he wants the gig badly enough.

And he’s not without competition. Matthew Addison, COSBOA’s chair, is in the mix (well, strongly rumoured to be; he totally denied it to us). Addison’s a bookkeeper without much government experience who’s been moonlighting as CEO and, frankly, as a bit of a flub-master, he’s already burned up some capital with the base.

Recall 2022, when he blindsided the membership and signed an MOU with the Australian Council of Trade Unions on multi-employer bargaining. The backlash was swift: they’d been played, sold out to the unions.

This all went down at the Albanese government’s Jobs and Skills Summit, where presumably Addison was too drunk on policy reform to clock the optics of going so badly off-piste. Addison defended himself, of course, then looked as though he’d fallen into another summit trap two months ago.

Giddy with his invitation to Jim Chalmers’ economic reform roundtable, he expressed agnosticism on a cashflow tax that Jim loved and business despised. Hours later, pelted with enough tomatoes by his members, Addison signed a joint statement that put the new tax into a bucket of lime.

Just what we heard. But with these two as contenders, small business stands to get even smaller, doesn’t it?