Coronavirus latest blow to bushfire-affected businesses across the Blue Mountains

29 March 2020

AUSTRALIA – Victor Peralta’s Katoomba art gallery was already doing it tough after bushfires in the region caused visitor numbers to plummet.

But he fears the coronavirus will be the final blow to the family business he runs with his wife Sharon and two of their seven children.

“The reality is that we will probably not survive this,” said Mr Peralta, of Gallery ONE88 Fine Arts.

“At the moment we’re closed. It’s a been quite a slow death since the bushfires in November so we’re now in our sixth month of business going down.

“Now with the doors closed we’ve got nothing going — the town’s closed essentially.”

Businesses throughout the Blue Mountains have been feeling the pinch since the Green Wattle Creek, Grose Valley and Gospers Mountain fires threatened the region last year.

During the bushfires, Scenic World closed for the first time in four decades since it first opened.

Managing director Anthea Hammond said she was again forced to close this week due to coronavirus, standing down 180 staff.

“We very much treat our staff like family so that was, to be honest, the toughest working day of my entire life and I hope I never have to have another one of those again,” she said.

“After four or five months of only 50 per cent revenue coming into the business we didn’t really have any other choice.”

Scenic World usually has about 2,500 visitors a day around this time of year, but that’s fallen to 1,000 a day in the past few weeks.

Ms Hammond said she was now helping staff find other jobs within the region “very much hoping they’ll be back to work with us when we reopen, hopefully later in the year”.

Community under ‘extreme stress’

Blue Mountains mayor Mark Greenhill said local businesses had been devastated by the “double blow” of bushfires and coronavirus.

“Our community is under extreme stress and this has been a deeply trying time for the Blue Mountains,” he said.

Mr Greenhill said the council had reduced rents for businesses and waived street fees but more needed to be done by other levels of government to support the Blue Mountains community.

“What business — particularly small businesses — need is not deferred payments or low-interest loans, they actually need cash,” he said.

“These are extraordinary times, direct injections of cash into small businesses is in my view a radical solution but a necessary solution for an area like this which is under so much stress.”

Mr Greenhill said support packages currently available to bushfire-affected areas were “awfully hard for people to actually qualify [for] and the money that’s promised seems to come through very slowly”.

This has been the experience of Jason Cronshaw, who co-owns Blue Mountains Explorer Buses and Fantastic Aussie Tours.

He said he has only been able to apply for a $10,000 bushfire recovery grant 10 days ago after his company was not considered to be in a bushfire-affected area.

Mr Cronshaw, who is also president of Blue Mountains Tourism, said his business fell 60 per cent following the bushfires.

Since coronavirus came into play, he has had to lay off 22 employees, with seven remaining workers left to share a couple of shifts per week.

The Blue Mountains is among 17 local government areas across NSW which have been identified as severely impacted by the bushfires.

Small businesses will be eligible for a $10,000 small business grant if they have experienced a 40 per cent drop in revenue over a three-month period, compared to the previous year, as a result of the bushfires.

A spokesperson for the NSW Disaster Recovery Office said the Blue Mountains had been allocated the fourth-highest number of small business grants, with 482 approved so far.

“That’s $4.82 million in the pockets of small businesses in the Blue Mountains.

Mr Peralta said he had not been able to get any government support.

“We’ve applied for everything we’re able to from a grant and a loan perspective and neither of the avenues have been made available to us,” he said.

“If it’s a grant we don’t meet the criteria, if it’s a loan our business is not structured to be able to cater for the repayments of the loan, so they get knocked back.”

He said with months of bills to pay, it was not going to be a matter of “business as usual” once the coronavirus threat was over.

“For us to recover we need a tsunami of people to come to the region to spend money.

“We don’t just need to go back to business as usual, we need to go business as usual times two for us to be able to recover — and that’s never going to happen.”

29. March 2020/by GFMCadmin