Chamber of Commerce's criticism of DSD unjustified (A/Prem)

State Development Minister and Acting Premier Ian Taylor today said Western Australia's Chamber of Commerce and Industry was concealing the fact that it received direct financial and professional assistance from the State Government.

"We provide this support to enable the chamber to offer the type of comprehensive services necessary to ensure Western Australian companies develop and maintain a competitive edge," Mr Taylor said.

"Frankly, we feel it is money very well spent. But I find it quite extraordinary that the chamber has now chosen to become a party to the Opposition's campaign to denigrate the very organisation - the Department of State Development (DSD) - which provides it and its members with so much essential assistance."

Mr Taylor said the chamber's deputy director, Ross McLean, had joined former chamber official, now Liberal deputy leader Colin Barnett, in a vitriolic attack on DSD's performance.

"I can understand Mr Barnett's wish to criticise any Government organisation as successful as DSD, but I am quite at a loss to fathom Mr Mclean's reasoning," Mr Taylor said.

"It is DSD which contributes the equivalent of $60,000 a year to ensuring that the chamber can access a comprehensive computerised data base on 4500 local companies and thus have the means to handle hundreds of trade enquires.

"It was also DSD which, together with Austrade, has been working with the chamber to create an international trade centre to promote Western Australian products.

"It is DSD which is helping the chamber expand its network overseas and is even DSD which is paying Mr McLean's airfares to Japan, so that later this month the chamber can link with the Hyogo Prefecture's Chamber of Commerce to develop bilateral trade.

"Yet Mr McLean is joining with Mr Barnett in condemning DSD as a 'disorganised and wasteful' bureaucracy.

"Presumably this 'disorganisation and waste' does not extend to those undertaking which DSD provides without charge to the chamber.

"Of course Mr Barnett, who has just had the benefit of a two-hour briefing on the workings and present programs of DSD, knows full well the criticisms do not coincide with the facts.

"For example, Mr Barnett is totally aware that far from DSD's $40 million budget going just to pay DSD's running costs, 40 per cent is spent directly on assistance to Western Australian companies - many of which are members of the chamber.  Less than 35 per cent actually goes on DSD salaries.

"The cash to industry helps cover research and development costs; it assists local companies enter the export market; and it enables local companies buy in the management expertise they need to become more internationally competitive."

Mr Taylor said there was no confusion, as Mr Barnett chose to allege, but a clear and comprehensive program which reflected the equally wide and diverse needs of the State's expanding industries.

"To suggest that 'hardly any broad projects have been initiated' by DSD is not only malicious, it is demonstrably nonsense," he said.

"It is DSD which created the Technology Park at Bentley; and it is DSD which is bringing together the Biotechnology Park at Coogee.

"It is DSD strategies which have put together the international program to attract a $1 billion pulp and paper mill investment to the South-West; and it is DSD that through local government is giving Western Australia the most comprehensive recycling program in the country - and creating multi-million dollar new industries in the process.

"Of course, none of this takes account of DSD's huge involvement in resource development which is seeing investment in the State running as more than $2,000 million a year.

"As I have said, I can understand Mr Barnett's wish to belittle DSD's efforts in helping the State, but I am at a loss to explain Mr McLean's behaviour - after all, it is through DSD that member companies of the chamber have benefited most of all."