Business leaders urge NSW Premier to keep the economy running in coronavirus crisis

Business leaders have urged Gladys Berejiklian to maintain a cool head in the coronavirus crisis and keep the economy running.

• ScoMo’s humanity for cruise passengers is ‘right’
• Inside the COVID-19 ICU ready for the pandemic

Business leaders have told Premier Gladys Berejiklian that any essential industries shut down during the coronavirus crisis could take a generation to recover.

“The economy is not like a tap you can turn off and on. Once you turn if off, it goes all the way off and all the experience and resources disappear and may never return,” former Business Council of Australia chairman Tony Shepherd writes in his column in today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph.

“Each time a piece of the economy is withdrawn — gyms and clothing stores one day, the entire construction sector the next — we are one move closer to a collapse from which it will take at least a generation to recover.”

Bluescope Steel Electrical Maintenance Coordinator, Dean Boyton, 49 and his daughter Torah, 16, who is in the first year of her apprenticeship, face an uncertain future. Picture: David Swift.

MORE NEWS

Hell on high seas: Aussies stuck on death ship

Easy explainer: New restrictions for Australians

Crackdown on gatherings as rental evictions to be banned

Mr Shepherd urged the premier to “hold the course” and keep the engine room of the NSW economy ticking over rather than close down sectors and risk losing them forever.

Dave Bell, general manager of BlueScope’s Port Kembla steelworks, said: “It takes eight weeks to shut down a blast furnace and two months to get back to anywhere near normal production. If we are forced to shut down the coke ovens there is a real risk we won’t be able to ever start them again.”

Closing down the furnaces — as BlueScope has been ordered to do in New Zealand — puts at risk 3500 jobs in an industry that provides one per cent of the NSW gross domestic product.

Mr Bell said there would also be unintended consequences. A by-product of the steelmaking process is that air is turned into oxygen for hospitals, which is badly needed for coronavirus patients.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian is being urged to allow heavy industry to continue. (Picture: Dean Sewell-Pool/Getty Images)

Freight On Rail Group (FORG) of Australia chair Dean Dalla Valle said if goods trains were halted, so too would the supply of food, household items and medical and pharmaceutical products needed by hospitals and people in isolation.

“A single-stacked 1800m interstate goods train can haul 260 shipping containers,” he said. “To put this in perspective, a single shipping container can hold approximately 25,000 toilet paper rolls, 55,000 food cans or 1500 cases of beer.

“Without freight trains, bulk exports like grain, meat, fresh and dry produce, cotton and coal cannot be efficiently hauled to ports, the gateways to global markets.”

Freight train driver Wayne Blewden has his job at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Picture: Toby Zerna

Construction company John Holland CEO Joe Barr said it was imperative the industry kept going. “Construction supports the livelihoods of tens and thousands of Australians,” Mr Barr said.

“On current government advice we have adopted a ­series of protocols to protect our people and the wider community, but we understand the situation is fluid and we will respond accordingly as needed and with public health and safety as the principal concern.”

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable said the mining industry had implemented strict protocols “to keep its workforce, families and communities safe and healthy.”