COVID lockdowns are killing small businesses

Paul Murray 

Now, businesses in Melbourne. Now, while they are the best position to the moment in terms of being able to open and all the rest of it, the financial support after their lockdown, just somewhat evaporated now, there’s always people who we get to talk to who are great advocates for the industries that they care about. But I reckon Bill Lang is one of the best that I’ve ever heard on this bloke is from Small Business Australia. And he fired up to me earlier in the week, hence a different jacket, about the need for genuine support for small business in Victoria, he’ll say it better than me.

Bill Lang 

You know, he’s been sending us a few photos of sort of getting a shave a week or two ago and a nice video interview with his wife good to see that he’s looking well, he’s recovered, says he’s going to stay, he’s going to win. It’s just so disappointing, Paul, that we sort of get this PR spin and we get these photos while we’ve got 10s of 1000s of Victorian small business people bleeding.

Paul Murray 

Yeah, it’s been a bit of a theme in tonight’s show, where, you know, sometimes it’s really hard to maintain a bit of confidence that your role in society isn’t just to pay tax and shut up. But what has happened, and I’ve seen this a long time ago, that when they change the way that elections are funded now where it’s all government funded, they don’t need to have any relationship with business, let alone any awareness of business. And we’ve seen this now for more than a year about the types of lockdowns, about the lack of support, about the ability for say, somebody who mows the lawn for the council can leave the house but the person who does it for Jim’s mowing can’t the idea that a be unionised workforce can work on a construction site. But somebody in a cafe is limited to the number of people that they can have through the door. None of this has ever made any sense. But I’ve got to say, you know, what’s your sense about the mood and the confidence of business people to just keep going?

Bill Lang 

Look, it’s, I’ve never seen thing things as bad as they are, in you know, 35 years of being involved in small business and big business, not just here in Australia, but in other countries.

We have Menzies’s called small business people, The Forgotten People. And sadly, the political parties of all persuasion, and at all levels are again, totally forgetting about these people.

Now, if the small business people aren’t prepared to put in the hours and do the work and take the risk to bake the pie, while state governments and federal governments want to keep carving up the pie, but when the Baker’s go home and decide they’re not coming back to the bakery, there is no pie Paul.

And this is the critical point I want to make. We hear all these throwaway words economic backbone of that country, blah, blah, blah. They’re doing a tough, they’re doing it tough. We’ve had more than 100,000 Small Business families already have to sell their house during the pandemic. And I ask every one of your viewers when they think about when they had work experience as a teenager was it with a big company or in a government department? No, no, no, it was a small with a small business. Who sponsors the local footy teams, the local netball teams? Small business people. Who’s donating you know the prizes for the school trivia night? You know and the meat tray at the RSL, it’s small business people. These, small business people are the heart and soul of the local communities. It’s the foundation of the Australian way of life and those sorts of institutional changes in where the politicians can just get funded based on the number of votes they’ve got.

They’re running a great big protection racket, it’s a duopoly, you’ve got a couple of choices. We’re getting to the stage where people are saying look, you know anyone but a politician, can we vote for anyone else because there’s 60% of us Paul out there, we don’t care about who’s wearing the red shirts, the green shirts, the blue shirts and making all the noise twittering around on Twitterati, we don’t care about seeing the premier of Victoria getting a shave and he’s gonna come back. What these 60% of people care about is making a living, being able to bring up their families and hoping that their children will have a better life in front of them than what they’ve had. And that is being destroyed at the moment here in Australia.