Coronavirus: Melbourne cafe targeted for owner’s lockdown views

Matt Lanigan says his cafe was swamped with one-star reviews after he questioned Labor Premier Daniel Andrews’s hospitality rules.

Melbourne’s Lucky Penny cafe owner Matt Lanigan. Picture: David Geraghty

Melbourne cafe owner Matt Lanigan says the community response was initially positive after he gave several interviews to TV stations and local online publications calling for uniformity between Victoria’s COVID-19 lockdown laws and those in other states last week.

But after the owner of South Yarra cafe Lucky Penny recorded a social media video with outspoken Victorian Liberal frontbencher Tim Smith, his business was swamped with dozens of one-star online reviews, amid a campaign from the Australian branch of international left-wing activist group Sleeping Giants.

The attack on Mr Lanigan’s business comes as other Victorian cafe owners say they fear small and mid-sized hospitality businesses will be “destroyed” by the rule of having one person every 4sq m, which will continue to apply even after restrictions are lifted sufficiently to allow up to 100 people­ into larger venues.

When every other state announced that cafes and restaurants would be able to serve eat-in meals to small numbers of customers, following the national cabinet’s announcement of a relax­ation of social distancing rules on May 8, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews opted to keep hospitality takeaway-only until at least the end of the month, saying businesses had told him it would not be ­viable to open for just 10 patrons.

Mr Lanigan said he had spoken out, because he believed businesses should have been able to make that decision themselves.

“We were disappointed the rest of the country was given an opportunity to decide if they could open viably and generate some more revenue, and we weren't given that same opportunity,” he said.

On Sunday, Mr Andrews announced­ that Victorian cafes, restaurants and pubs would be able to serve meals to up to 20 customer­s from June 1, with up to 50 patrons from June 22 and 100 from the second half of July, subject­ to the 4sq m rule.

Mr Lanigan said he had been pleased to finally get some certainty. “If we had been told, ‘you can’t do this but this is the plan’, then there wouldn’t have been any need for the lobbying that we did the week before, or all the people contacting us going, ‘how does this affect you?’,” he said.

But by the time Mr Andrews made his announcement on Sunday, a tweet from Sleeping Giants Oz accusing “Tim Smith’s great mate” Mr Lanigan of appearing in TV interviews to provide “all the right anti-Dan (Andrews) ans­wers” was already doing the rounds online, resulting in a flurry of negative reviews that cut Lucky Penny’s rating, earned organically through six years of positive customer reviews, from 4.7 stars to 4.3.

“Our brand’s stronger than these nuisances, but almost none of them are locals or have ever visit­ed the cafe,” Mr Lanigan said. “A lot of them have profiles which say they’re from Sydney.”

Mr Lanigan said he had been speaking as a business owner in the interests of struggling hospitality employees and employers.