Calls for Urgent Assistance Package
The Gold Coast is slipping into the most dire economic condition in living memory, despite other cities in Australia showing signs of rampant recovery.
Families are splitting as the breadwinner leaves the home to find more work, businesses are closing down and there is a skills exodus from the city.
Business leader John Witheriff has called for a special assistance package to get the city moving again. If it was rural Australia hit by a drought, the damage would be obvious but the Gold Coast recession is camouflaged somewhat by the beauty of our surrounds.
The facts are laid out bare here for all to read. The political response so far has been underwhelming.
LET'S not sugar coat things; This has been a very tough downturn for the Gold Coast. It has had a significant and real impact on Gold Coast families.
When I gave evidence before a recent Federal Parliamentary Enquiry, I had the dubious pleasure of indicating that the suburb with the highest level of mortgage defaults in Australia was in fact Helensvale.
In 2008 our unemployment rate sat at 2.9% well below the Queensland average of 3.8% and the Australian average of 4.2 per cent.
Unemployment now sits at over 7% across the Gold Coast and is climbing with the Gold Coasts northern suburbs over 10% whilst the rest of Australia is sitting at 5.8%
Even at 7.2 per cent, it masks the real difficulties facing this economy. The Gold Coast has the largest number of small businesses per capita in Australia, - at last estimate some 54,000. The owners of these businesses for the most part are being significantly impacted by this downturn, yet the impact on them is not accounted for in these figures.
Many retirees have lost money in corporate collapses such as MFS and City Pacific. A good friend of mine runs a debt collection business and tells me that he has never seen anything like the hardship people are enduring at the moment. The pain associated with parents pulling their children out of school because they can no longer afford the school fees is only one indication of the difficulties presently being endured.
Most of us know people who now have the breadwinner either travelling daily from the Gold Coast to work or having to move away to support the family. I remember seeing images of rural Australia impacted by drought and observing the heartbreak of families being dislocated with husbands having to move to the city to try and make ends meet. All of us know of families who are suffering similar difficulties on the Gold Coast now!
If this was rural Australia, and not the glitzy and glamorous Gold Coast, it would be seen as a national tragedy and State and Federal Government would have in place relief programs. Frankly, none of this is occurring.
The Gold Coast has in front of it a range of major challenges. With the exception of a number of projects, the Carrara Stadium, the new hospital and the early stages of the Light Rail Project (to name a few), we are not seeing the benefit of significant government funding unlike Brisbane and the other capital cities.
The other source of capital is from private investment in the mining industry and we see very little of that on the Gold Coast.
This city is dominantly driven by private capital and that capital flows into the city when there is confidence. That confidence is simply not there.
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