Eddy Edwinsson

Buy your own coffee machine? A typical comment from someone who has no idea about either how small businesses run or the value of them to the local community. A massive number of small businesses like cafes, corner stores and restaurants rely on repeat customers. A large proportion of those customers are locals, just like the business owners themselves. Under Labor, small businesses have have been forced to continually increase their prices just to keep up with such things as hikes in power costs, increased rent, higher delivery of products due to increased fuel prices etc. Not to mention increased pressure on cash flow due to new tax compliance and IR rules and penalties (because now they can’t just “scape by” until they hit busy periods to meet those obligations). If a customer uses a card to pay then the business owner must either pass on the surcharge or pay the surcharge themselves. It is that simple because the surcharge does not magically disappear. Small businesses owners are typically most embarrassed and apologetic when they are forced to increase their prices under any circumstance. I have witnessed those conversations many, many times, and it’s not easy because businesses owners know that the wider community is also suffering it with their own financial situations. If prices continue to rise then enviably people will reduce their spending which in turn will impact those local businesses, a great many of them who employ local people by the way. If they don’t increase their prices then they go backwards. When those businesses are squeezed too far they close, which then impacts the whole community (loss of services, loss of variety and choice, and loss of local jobs). Credit card surcharges are just the fine tip of a wider issue, and that issue is the increasingly punitive approach that Labor is taking to small businesses in general. They are called small businesses for a reason… they are SMALL. Their operations are typically small, their turnover is small, and moreover their profit margins are also small. Nevertheless, they play a BIG role in the local economy and community. They will in most cases try to look after customers who pay in cash by offering discounts, but when the cost of just staying open keeps going up and up and up, prices must also go up in line with those increases. But what happens when those price increases reach a point where struggling customers are not longer willing to pay them? The problem is much bigger than surcharges, and Labor damn well know it. But the politicians will just keep banging on about the small stuff without addressing the wider underlying issues. They can’t do otherwise as that would be tantamount to admitting they have screwed small businesses right across the nation on a massive scale. Politicians are, on the whole, incredibly insulated from how the average person is surviving in this day and age. Look at the rorting, look at the remuneration, look at the waste, look at the bureaucracy, look at the inefficiency. Look at the policies that just keep making things harder. And look at the absolute hypocrisy. Now look at the number of small businesses that have gone under, and will continue to do so in the near future, not because they were bad operators, but because they just couldn’t afford to stay open as a result of this Government’s destructive policies and resultant indifference. Just buy your own coffee machine and make your coffee at home? Fuck off, you are absolutely a weak, clueless and complicit excuse for a politician.