Ed Gannon: Here’s how we can best help the bush rebound

Bushfires have left much of the state’s best-loved seasonal spots feeling serious financial pain. But if we come up with ideas — even crazy ones — we’ll find a way to help those doing it hard, writes Ed Gannon.

Try to imagine a situation where, four weeks before Christmas, barriers were placed across every street leading to Chadstone Shopping Centre — and then those barriers stayed in place for a month.

Not cars, no buses, certainly no pedestrian, or bike rider would be allowed to enter — no one.

And imagine if any access the Chadstone store owners had to the internet — another possible avenue to sell their goods — was also cut off.

And those barriers, both physical and electronic, were erected even though the management of Chadstone or the hundreds of store owners had done nothing wrong — certainly nothing to have prompted it.

The whole situation was entirely out of their control.

You would imagine those businesses would be crippled; they could well collapse because December is their premier trading period, a month where they can make twice as much income as in a normal month.

It’s a month that actually provides their annual profit.

Yet this is exactly what is happening now in Gippsland and North East Victoria. And the implications for those regions are worse than any hypothetical situation at Chadstone.

Bushfires have ravaged much of Victoria’s regions including Gippsland’s Bunyip State Park. Picture: Alex Coppel/News Corp

Bushfires have created physical barriers that are preventing customers from getting to stricken businesses that would have earned more than half their annual income from holiday makers this month.

Accommodation, food, surf shops, boat hire, servos — all are going backwards by the day.

The harsh reality is that many will not survive.

And in many cases, while the physical barriers have now been removed, the fear of bushfire danger and smoke has created a mental barrier for many potential visitors.

And even businesses that are nowhere near the fires are suffering as a result of that fear barrier and are also losing out.

The problem, of course, is that most of us have had our Christmas break and are now back at work. We can’t now rerun our holidays to head back to fire-affected regions for a week. Most workers simply don’t have extra holidays in the bank.

And a return to school is just the other side of the Australia Day weekend and that’s a time when family weekends start to be taken up with kids’ sports.

Many of the businesses that are hardest hit require people to actually visit, to turn up at their towns and their shops. Food, accommodation and fuel are not something you can order online 300km away.

Much of the state’s worst-affected areas - like Clifton Creek in Gippsland - may need creative solutions to ensure the best long term recovery. Picture: Alex Coppel.

But what if we could find a way to pay for those services without physically visiting the areas that are struggling.

What if you could buy something in Melbourne and a percentage went to a similar store or service in a fire-affected area.

It would be a kind of bushfire business buddy system.

A metro servo could, for instance, assign some of its fuel sales to a country counterpart.

You could buy a tank of juice in, say, Malvern and 20 per cent of the proceeds would go to a servo in Cann River.

Or you’d book a room at Crown and a part of that would go to a motel in Lakes Entrance.

Buy a beer in a Flinders Lane bar and part of it goes to a Corryong pub. Order a meal in Armadale and a cafe in Omeo gets a cut.

You can eat, drink and stay in the city and a country bushfire business buddy gets some much needed income.

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Do it for a month so the metro businesses don’t also start to bleed — it’s worth remembering that there are city tourism businesses that have been hit by weeks of smoke pollution.

Anyway, you’d like to think that an effective promotion campaign would boost patronage of the city business enough to make up for handing part of their proceeds to a rural buddy.

It is not a replacement for the rural businesses, but it would give them a hand.

And don’t think that you are merely supporting the rural arms of big businesses. Many of the big chain servos, motels and food places are franchises, owned by local families who pay a franchise fee. And they employ locals.

Now’s the time for us to come up with ideas, even ones that might sound a bit crazy. Because we’ve got to do something to break down the barriers.

Ed Gannon is editor of The Weekly Times.

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