The Naracoorte Lucindale Council will do what it can within all townships of the district to provide an environment where business can thrive.

That’s the assurance from mayor Patrick Ross to all businesses in the district, which are still recovering from Covid-19 and now feeling the pinch of inflationary pressures.

While many businesses in the district failed to remain open after the pandemic, Mr Ross says small businesses in town were “very risky”.

“Small business is very risky, and there are many failures for many different reasons, which only a very close look at the business in detail may provide,” he said.

Mr Ross said the council’s responsibility was to ensure it provided fit-for-purpose roads and paving as well as maintaining a commercial precinct where businesses could hopefully thrive.

“Council also has representation on the Naracoorte Business Organisation (Association), where needs and wants can be discussed and debated on council involvement with our business community.

“It is essential that the CBD of Naracoorte is working at the most efficient level (especially roads and pedestrian traffic) to ensure both businesses and shoppers and visitors can move about freely.”

He said the council was keen to hear from those within the community about ways to improve the towns.

Cr Cameron Grundy said his summation of Naracoorte businesses, albeit anecdotal, was that most of the businesses in the district had done well during Covid, particularly those associated with agriculture.”

“It would appear the government’s financial stimulus measures were somewhat overly generous, with it being suggested in the mainstream media that the stimulus has been a contributing factor to our current inflation problem,” Cr Grundy said.

He said one of the biggest threats to business and industry was the lack of cheap and dependable gas and electricity.

“This is particularly concerning where base load generation is shut down, with that same generating capacity not being replaced.

“In South Australia, we have gone from having some of the cheapest electricity in the world to now having some of the dearest.”

He said the “entire problem can be attributed to incompetent politicians on both sides of politics”.

“The problems started when our essential services were privatised, including electricity, with the problem being that you can only ever privatise the profits while infrastructure is inevitably allowed to run down.

“The other problem is that in Australia we have become too pious to use the cheap and accessible energy supplies that we have been blessed with, while at the same time we export them to competing nations that take full advantage of our cheap and reliable energy resources.”

He said cheap and reliable energy was the basis for any successful, industrious economy where the population could enjoy a high standard of living.

“Agriculture is directly exposed to this problem as it relies heavily on associated secondary industries, including meat processing and transport, just to name a couple.”

He said the situation governments have created for the Australian population could only be described as “insane”.

This article appeared in the Naracoorte Community News.