Page 93 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 8 February 2022
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At the Knox Cafe in Watson, general manager, Maddy Kreyl, reported that it had been super quiet and added:
It’s disappointing because it should be alive and busy and this is normally the time when everyone is at their happiest but it’s just not been like that.
King O’Malley’s owner, Peter Barclay, summed up the feeling of many small business owners when he said:
Coffee shops, newsagents, drycleaners and retailers are struggling because the ACT government in particular has a new office building in Civic and very few people are working there.
As I said before, these are not just faceless buildings. They are people. They are families. They are Canberrans that own the businesses.
The Chief Minister’s trumpeted V-shape recovery has not happened, and I call on the Treasurer to acknowledge that. If the Chief Minister took seriously the dire situation facing Canberra’s struggling small businesses, he would come clean and admit that the small business sector is experiencing no V-shaped recovery and, if he respected our hardworking small business community and their importance to our economy, he would respond to my call and prepare an updated economic recovery plan to support small business so that they can plan the path forward.
As Tim Manning from ARC Cafe has said:
We’re just trying to adjust and plan for what is coming through the door and the likelihood for more people to be around or less people to be around.”
Graeme Katz echoed Mr Manning’s call when he commented:
If the pathway of the ACT public service is a pathway of remove working hubs … the sooner we can see that plan and the sooner businesses can understand how that might impact them, and also where the opportunities may be for businesses, the better off they’ll be.
In his ministerial statement today, the Chief Minister said:
We live in a time of great uncertainty.
The ACT small business community also endures a climate of great confusion thanks to this incompetent government. As we know, many of our Canberra small businesses are mum-and-dad family businesses, and their businesses are dying.
A cafe owner I met recently is a former tradie. He said that business was woeful. He was not celebrating any V-shaped economic recovery. No-one is, except this out-of-touch Labor-Greens government.
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