The freelancer said the state government should consider other ways, apart from GST registration, for small businesses to prove they were genuine claimants for official financial support.

“It’s not the only way and it’s certainly not the fair way because it excludes people like me, who do get all my income from my business and I work 50 or 60 hours a week to provide for my family.

“I don’t know why they didn’t come up with a sliding scale for non-GST people who can prove, showing a tax return from last year, that they have lost out.”

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Announcing the latest $400 million tranche of the business support effort last week, Industry Recovery Minister Martin Pakula indicated that more help could be on the way.

But he pointed to the difficulties of designing a fraud-resistant scheme to benefit the sparsely regulated micro-sector, with 150,000 Australian Business Number holders in Victoria not registered for GST.

But small business council interim chief executive Alexi Boyd said the present system was arbitrary, inequitable and unfair.

“It’s inequitable, it’s treating start-ups, micro businesses and sole traders in a different category altogether when they are not,” Ms Boyd said on Sunday.

“It’s just not right to be treating these businesses any differently from any other when they are suffering proportionately, just as much as larger ones.”

The council said it had been calling since the beginning of the pandemic for a national approach to prevent micro-operators, start-ups and all sole traders from slipping through the cracks in the state schemes.

A Victorian government spokesman told The Age that the majority of calls to the micro-business hotline — 1424 out of 1816 — had been resolved without the need for a follow-up appointment.

More Business Victoria public servants would be working the phones from Monday, the spokesman said, allowing another 250 follow-up appointments a week.

“We will continue to monitor the volume of calls and appointments made with the concierge service and adjust the delivery of the service as required,” the spokesman said.

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The state opposition has attempted to turn up the pressure on the government to do more for the small business sector. Victorian Liberals leader Michael O’Brien said more cash bail-outs and a greater easing of restrictions were desperately needed.

“There are a lot of small businesses doing it really, really tough despite the end of lockdown,” Mr O’Brien said.

“The end of lockdown doesn’t mean the end of pain for small businesses, and we’re calling on the government to step up, to help more, because small businesses desperately need it.“

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