While this is a serious campaign, fighting a serious threat, Love you local shops is also about recognising and celebrating the role that great local shops play in our communities.
So often, it’s the businesses and the hardworking people who run and work in them that help create these focal points for communities. They help create places where people love to linger, to enjoy a coffee, a long chat with a friend, or to leisurely (and all too often quickly) go about the week’s big shop.
We’re starting the campaign in the State Electorates of Balmain and Drummyone. In the great local shops throughout these electorates we’ll be asking local MPs Verity Firth and Angela D’Amore for their help in ensuring the final Centres Policy doesn’t disadvantage independent businesses.
If you’re outside of these electorates you can still get involved and stay up-to-date, via our website, our Facebook page or Twitter.
The policy gives big developers and the large retail chains the ability to drive rezonings through the planning system without proper regard for communities.
The policy over-emphasises the role of commercial zoning at the expense of other land uses. By deregulating the planning system, the Draft will enable new shopping centres to be built on all land, including residential land.
While it aims to improve competition in the retail sector, the Draft would achieve the opposite. By encouraging the oversupply of commercial floor space the Draft favours the preferred operational models of the two major retail players at the expense of independent businesses.
This campaign was started by the Independent Retailers of NSW and ACT Inc. These are independent retailers, who trade under the IGA banner. In many cases they are owner-operator businesses, run by families.
Communities and independent retail businesses from all over NSW are invited to join the Love Your Local Shops campaign.
We aim to ensure the strong, competitive, independent retail businesses are not disadvantaged by NSW planning policy.
In pulling this campaign together, we’re already gained support from other concerned retailers, including hardware retailers, specialty supermarkets and others.
Check out the Centre for Independently-owned Retail Research at www.cirr.com.au . Their focus is on the value proposition that independently-owned retailing is beneficial to its host community and a variety of stakeholders including the national interest, and to provide a source of quality research which supports that proposition.
The Draft Centres Policy is a planning policy proposed by the NSW Government.
It seeks to change the way commercial and retail developments are planned and approved.
The Draft encourages the over-supply of retail floor space in new centres, outside of existing centres. It also proposes to expand the edges of existing centres.
Only the retail giants can survive this policy. The big chains with dominant market-share can subsidise the losses in an over-supplied local market.
This will suck business, jobs and the vitality from existing centres and communities.
The draft is available at www.planning.nsw.gov.au/asp/pdf/draftcentrespolicy_apr09.pdf.
We’re hoping that with your help the final policy the Government adopts will promote a competitive retail sector without risking our communities, independent retailers and jobs.