When I speak to small and family businesses owners in and around Warrnambool, the message I hear over and over is that they need a break.
Whether it’s a family farm, a coffee shop, the local hairdresser or a sheet metal workshop, everywhere I go, I hear the now all-too-familiar stories of unpaid bills piling up on the fridge door or on the desk.
We all hear about the seemingly unending cost-of-living crisis affecting households, but we don’t hear nearly as much about the very real cost-of-doing-business crisis that’s pushing many local small and family businesses to the wall.
It’s not uncommon for local business owners to tell me that haven’t paid themselves in months or that they can’t afford to pay someone to replace them while they take a much needed holiday.
So many of them are facing a perfect storm of skyrocketing electricity bills, higher loan repayments, increased staffing costs and insurance premiums. Our small businesses can’t catch a break.
I want to be able to tell them that things will get better, but we know, from what the Reserve Bank says, that things are likely to get even worse before they improve.
A recent report by Creditor Watch has indicated that one in eleven hospitality businesses are set to fail over the next year. This comes after a new national record has been set for the number of businesses going bust in a single year, including 2,863 in Victoria.
Our hospitality sector is under particular pressure with 1,668 Australian accommodation and food services companies going under in the last 12 months as discretionary spending decreases.
Our main streets haven’t been spared the pain either with 768 Australian retailers closing down.
Our industrial precincts have suffered too with 578 Aussie manufacturers closing their doors last year.
But it’s been the construction industry that’s been the worst affected. A staggering 2,977 Aussie construction companies have called it quits, at a time when access to and affordability of housing, especially for young people, is at an all-time low.
All of this has happened under the failed economic policies of the Albanese Labor Government. Many local businesses managed to survive a once-in-a-century pandemic but are fighting to survive under this Government.
Labor has taken the economy down the wrong track and this will continue to have a very real impact on the viability of local small and family businesses. Shuttered small businesses appear to be the collateral damage of the failures of Anthony Albanese to focus on one of his most fundamental jobs – managing the economy.
The Prime Minister must take responsibility for these failures and give small businesses the break that they so desperately deserve.
Published in The Warrnambool Standard
