With the ACT Government slated to announce some adjustments to the current lockdown restrictions tomorrow, local retailers are hopeful they will be able to resume safe, contactless delivery and click-and-collect.
Fyshwick Business Association President Rob Evans told Canberra Daily decisions need to be made quickly to get non-essential retailers and traders back into business.
Mr Evans is calling on the ACT Government to allow non-essential businesses to conduct safe, contactless delivery and click-and-collect where relevant.
“We want to be able to trade in contactless manner with our customers,” he said. “Our customers want to buy local, and they want to help us.
“Now is the time for us to be able to be accountable ourselves for trading contactless, and that will help get the wheels of commerce rolling … We don’t want to wait until the end of the lockdown for that.”
Given 95 per cent of Fyshwick businesses have had “absolutely zero income” over the last two weeks, Mr Evans said the situation has become catastrophic in the light industrial precinct.
After the experiences of 2020, many retailers have the capacity to pivot quickly to a safe, online delivery and click-and-collect model, with a lot of the online infrastructure already in place.
“So many of the smaller businesses are completely struggling, they’ve had zero income and they’re frustrated because they look across the border and see they are losing business to businesses that are allowed to deliver,” Mr Evans said.
“They’ve got the ability to do that; now that’s inconsistent.”
With the calls reverberating across Canberra’s business community since the first week of lockdown, Mr Evans is “very hopeful” a decision will be made tomorrow by the ACT Government to allow local retailers to safely operate online.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr today said such an adjustment to restrictions on non-essential retailers is under “active consideration”.
“I can say I am aware, and we’ve had many good and detailed engagements with individual businesses as well as their representative bodies on how this could be done safely,” he said.
Mr Barr said it’s a question of what level of risk the government is prepared to take, with some “difficult decisions” to be made to strike a balance between public health and economic activity.
“What we will seek to do as we step through the next three months is to, within the risk that we can bear, increase economic activity,” he said.
“If we take too much risk and allow too much activity then case numbers will increase again, and we’ll have to go back into a lockdown and a hard lockdown.”
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