Page 1461 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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I want to turn to the issues at Deakin shops. Deakin shops have seen a much-needed upgrade in recent times. It has been a long-delayed upgrade but it has to be said that it has not been handled very well by the government. And we saw the recent article in the Canberra Times in relation to the owner of Double Shot raising concerns about the impact on his business of the way that the refurbishment has been handled. It is worth reading out a couple of extracts from that article in relation to what is going on at Deakin. It says:
After having his Deakin cafe barricaded behind fences for six weeks, Daryl Hehir-Nielsen is starting to lose patience with ACT Government’s $1.1 million upgrade of the Deakin shops.
He says Territory and Municipal Services has failed to live up to its promise that “works will be carefully planned and staged to minimise impacts on businesses and users of the centre” …
Mr Hehir-Nielsen said he was told the work outside his cafe would start about January 10 and be finished before the end of the month. It started on January 20 and was still going.
“From day one it’s been what I like to call pie-crust promises, easily made and easily broken,” he said.
“I have written to TAMS and to Jon Stanhope asking them where and how they have minimised the impact on my business, because digging all this up during the busiest month of this year … is having a big impact.” …
Cafe D’Lish owner, Peter Zimmermann said the upgrade was a “disaster” and a waste of taxpayers’ money, changes to the car park actually making it more difficult for drivers to negotiate the space. He was also upset about the timing of the work.
The Deakin newsagency owner also expressed concerns. The issue here, having spoken to Daryl about this, is this has been a long-needed upgrade but it seems that, instead of actually working with business owners in terms of the timing so that we could minimise the impact on these businesses, the government, unfortunately, did not work as constructively as it should have. What we saw instead was far more disruption than was needed. And for small business owners this is quite significant. Indeed, the headline was “Gas bust compounds Deakin ‘disaster’”.
I was visiting with Daryl to talk about the issues that very day. I went to go into his cafe and the cafe had been closed because the gas main had been ruptured or affected and the cafe had closed for the morning. So not just the morning’s trade had been lost but the timing has meant that the outdoor area—we know in Canberra there are only a few months where you can really use the outdoor area at its maximum use—has been affected during the warmer months.
I think Daryl would have preferred that there had been less disruption, that it had been done during the cooler months and that, when they said it was going to be done in a couple of weeks, they stuck to that time frame. Unfortunately that has not been the case.
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