Will you support local and Australian, is the question? (Even with your morning coffee!)
Over the last few months, Sunshine Coast Business Now has continued to focus attention on the challenge we have, that’s so easily overcome, by simply supporting local Australian owned businesses, first!
It doesn’t matter whether it’s coffee, beer, travel booking sites, food delivery options, your daily milk, or honey for the morning crumpets, we all too often rely heavily on businesses owned by huge overseas multi nationals, and continue to go past the local business that supplies a better product, but often it might be a little more expensive, so the decision comes down to price.
When you think that 85% of all beer sold in Australia is Japanese owned, you start to get a picture of how serious our reliance on products and also technology based services are. But, we have everything, regardless of what it is. We make beer, we produce milk, we have technology, but we continue to support other overseas owned more often for convenience than anything else.
One Australian company is being taken over by another overseas giant one after another and you can’t blame the old owners, who’s going to knock back a multi million dollar offer. But there are things that our governments and then us as consumers can do.
Unfortunately though, it’s going to take effort. It requires us to ensure we are buying from local suppliers, check packaging, use the social media platforms to identify locally made and then change and stay local.
Most of the buy local campaigns just don’t get the traction they need. The recent example of the plight of the hotel industry that are in effect held to ransom by the big travel booking sites, that if they don’t list with them, will certainly miss out on bookings. But we could book direct. We could only buy from local.
I read an article recently about the Australian coffee growing industry that prior to the 1920’s, produced around 40% of the coffee for the Australian market, and then by 1926, that industry ground to a halt and lay dormant for the next 50 years. We now produce under 1% of our Australian coffee needs according to recent coffee industry data. The rest is imported and most because of price alone.
You could bang on for days, months and years about what needs to happen, but it requires a brain reboot, a change in habit, government support and a movement to go, enough is enough. If we don’t support local even just a little more, what’s the next industry we lose. A small change of only 10% in buying local first, has the ability to add more than $25 billion dollars into our economy!
Sunshine Coast Business Now is just one platform designed to do one thing. Focus attention on local businesses only and ours is simply about Sunshine Coast business. It’s free to list your business and it’s then easier for consumers to find you. Just click the link. https://form.jotform.co/90707302203848
If the idea of supporting local, to grow local jobs and local communities sounds like a good idea, get behind the movement.
Find local, buy local, stay local!
