Small Business Week

Ms MICHAELS (Enfield) (15:33): I rise to speak about Small Business Week, which was held in South Australia the week before last. It gave us an opportunity to celebrate South Australian small businesses, including all the entrepreneurs who take risks and opportunities for the benefit not only of their families but of the state as a whole. We are a small business state and it is important to acknowledge the contribution that small businesses make to the state of South Australia.

As the shadow minister for small business and family business, part of the job that I enjoy most is meeting with local businesspeople and talking through their issues. I want to mention in this speech going to visit Darren Brown at the Prince Albert Hotel. Darren reopened the Prince Albert Hotel after it closed very early on during COVID. His aim is to bring it back to life. It is a beautiful old building. His intention is to have 10 employees once it fully ramps up. At the moment he has Satchel, Ellie, Jordie, Georgia and Ned working there, and they provide excellent hospitality, as I witnessed firsthand.

Interestingly, Darren looked very familiar to me when I went to visit him. He told me he was previously involved in Ivy Entertainment. When I looked at him, I thought, 'I know you from somewhere,' and he said, 'Yes, I helped your son with his DJ for his 16^th birthday.' He has now obviously reinvigorated the Prince Albert Hotel and I hope that his vision for the wonderful reinvigoration of that building is brought to life.

I also visited Sports Locker on Main North Road at Prospect in my own electorate of Enfield, visiting once again Don and Kay Shipway, who have been there for 40 years. Don originally started Sports Locker under the name of Robran and Shipway, two very well-known names in the South Australian sporting community, with Barry Robran at the Roosters and Don Shipway, a great name in the basketball world, who was a coach of the 36ers in its heyday.

Sports Locker is a small specialty athletics shop. Over the years, it has battled big brands and now, of course, online shopping, but Don is a fighter and he fights very passionately for providing excellent customer service and competitive prices in the athletics shoe space. He does not back away from a fight, and that taught me that we really need to do more for our small businesses in this state. We must fight for them to help them.

A couple of weeks ago, I walked through Regent Arcade to a function and sadly shopfront after shopfront said 'closed, for lease'. I think up to 14 shops in that beautiful arcade between Rundle Mall and Grenfell Street are now empty. It really is a tale of woe for our small independent retail sector, particularly given the announcement today of a potential referendum on shop trading hours. It is a sad tale that our government is trying to decimate small businesses in a quest to deregulate shop trading hours, which inevitably only helps large national and international retailers squeeze out more mum-and-dad operators. I hope the government reconsiders its position on this.

We have been trying to rebuild our state's economy. We need to do that as we crawl out of this COVID recession. We need to do more for small businesses to help them grow and thrive. We still have certain sectors that are suffering greatly—in travel, in hospitality, particularly in hospitality in the CBD—and we need to do more to help them. We have the worst unemployment rate in the country, and we are the only state to have lost jobs in this COVID pandemic. We really must do more to help small businesses grow, continue to hire South Australians and, as a small business state, support our small businesses.

As the shadow minister, I want to extend my gratitude to small businesses and family businesses throughout the state that have been fighting hard in the last 12 months during the COVID pandemic and wish them well.