President's Report - February 2022

It’s been a difficult start to the year for business owners, including our 280 Southport Chamber members, with modelling showing the constraints on Queensland businesses over January impacted the state’s economy an estimated $180 million per day in lost economic activity.

Business like you have told us their ability to maintain normal operational hours or service delivery, staff availability and supply chain disruptions were the most significant constraints on their recovery and ability to get back to business after Christmas.

Since December 2021, the Southport Chamber of Commerce have advocated to government for three things to support Gold Coast businesses:

• Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) to be freely and widely available for businesses;
• The list of essential industries expanded; and
• Joint state and federal financial support for businesses forced to close directly due to public health directions.

While RAT’s are becoming more available, and the list of essential industries has been expanded, we are still calling for a joint state and federal financial support package for businesses.

This is more necessary now than ever before, with the latest results from CCIQ indicating that the Omicron COVID-19 variant is expected to wreak havoc in the March quarter.

In fact, many Gold Coast businesses indicated that the Omicron strain is expected to cause just as much economic harm to their business as the original emergence of COVID-19 in the first half of 2020.

I’ll keep calling for a support package, like I did on ABC Gold Coast and MMM last week (listen here), and through communication to the Department of Small Business and CCIQ each week.

The silver lining is that Gold Coast businesses are reporting partially better performance in the December quarter than the Statewide average – however the anticipated deterioration in the March quarter for Gold Coast businesses is expected to be on par with the deterioration Statewide.

Our first Southport Community Consultative Committee meeting for the year was held on 22^nd of February and was well attended by a cross section of government, education, property and business leaders. Some of the key stakeholders who attended or sent representatives were the Queensland Police Service, the City of Gold Coast, Queensland Parliament, Study Gold Coast, Placemakers* Gold Coast, iEDM, Urbis, Maylake and Southport State High.

The Southport Consultative Committee is a sub-committee of the Southport Chamber of Commerce, with the aim of bringing together key Southport stakeholders to meet and discuss matters within the CBD, as well as an opportunity to discuss future activations and special projects.

The committee was briefed on some exciting upcoming announcements regarding activations in the CBD, and we look forward to sharing more information on this in the coming month.

In event news, our upcoming Southport Chamber event is planned for 16 March at SOPO Brewing Co, Southport’s newest microbrewery. Tickets can be purchased here and we’d love to see you there.

With most recent news, we are thinking of the many businesses in Southport and it’s surrounds who have been impacted by the current weather events in South East Queensland.

Continue to stay informed and monitor flood conditions at https://dashboard.cityofgoldcoast.com.au

For flood assistance, businesses can contact the SES on 132 500. In a life-threatening emergency, always dial triple zero (000).

My personal email is president@scoc.org.au.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you think we can help, particularly if we can help communicate to government on assistance needed.

 

Kind Regards,
Ariana Margetts

President – Southport Chamber of Commerce