Coronavirus: Scott Morrison’s plea: Let’s get city hearts pumping again

Scott Morrison has appealed to the nation’s workers to get back to the office and help turbocharge the economy.

Shaini Hosseini, the owner of the Uplift coffee shop in Perth’s CBD, with staff member Alejandro Gonzalez. Picture: Colin Murty

Scott Morrison has appealed to the nation’s workers to get back to the office and help turbocharge the economy as businesses struggle to coax employees out of their homes and into CBDs.

As the head of the Commonwealth’s Public Service Commission ordered the country’s 250,000 bureaucrats to get back into the office wherever it is safe to do so, the Prime Minister called for large corporations to loosen restrictions in cities with little to no coronavirus infections in a bid to save small businesses that have suffered a huge drop in foot traffic.

“It is important whether it’s here in the ACT or in Sydney or in Brisbane or Perth or anywhere else where the health advice enables it — obviously Victoria is still in a different position right now — for public servants to be back in their offices, buying their lunch at the local cafe and doing all of those things which support particularly those CBD economies,” Mr Morrison said.

Mobility data from Goo­gle shows people’s move­ments into CBDs are still well down from their pre-COVID levels, even in jurisdictions where there have not been cases of community transmission for several months.

Visits to the Perth and Adelaide CBDs are down about 10 per cent from the start of the year, according to the data, while Brisbane (down 25 per cent), Sydney (down 38 per cent) and Melbourne (down 70 per cent) are much lower.

Hobart has returned to its pre-COVID level.

Mr Morrison’s call has come too late for Shaini Hosseini, who is now looking to put her Perth CBD coffee shop up for sale.

It opened in January but was then forced to close for three months due to COVID-19. She said the cafe sold as few as five coffees a day when it reopened in June, and while business had picked up it was still well short of the levels at the start of the year.

“The big problem is that so many of the office workers love working from home,” she said. “The city’s still very quiet; it’s not the same as before.”

Mr Morrison’s push to reinvigorate the CBDs faces resistance from a growing number of workers who have come to prefer working from home for at least some, if not all, of the week. The Western Australian government has been encouraging people to get back to work since May, but numbers in the CBD are still down significantly on their pre-COVID levels despite little to no health risks in Perth’s offices.

Mr Morrison and WA Premier Mark McGowan have put much of the blame at the feet of national and international companies that have applied restrictions designed for cities with high rates of infection compared to offices in Perth, where there has not been a case of community transmission in more than five months.

 

But worker pre­f­erences have also been a factor. Occupancy levels inside the Perth offices of big mining houses including Rio Tinto, BHP and South32 are at less than their permitted capacity as workers embrace the flexibility of working from home.

The Perth headquarters of Wes­farmers, meanwhile, is at around 80-85 per cent capacity. While the company has introduced increased flexibility around working from home, it is recommending one day a week “as a general standard”. Its Sydney and Melbourne office staff continue to work from home.

Others, however, such as the head offices of Woodside Petroleum, are back to normal levels.

Westpac yesterday flagged it would look to boost numbers working in its offices across the country in line with guidance from health authorities.

“We are reviewing our plans for safe return to the workplace and are slowly increasing the number of people in our office locations where it is safe to do so,” a bank spokeswoman said.

Additional reporting: Tom Dusevic