Walking through a suburb with empty commercial spaces as small businesses suffer, Di Jenkins writes she feels “an unmistakeable chill down my hunched and withered Gen X spine.” Photo: Supplied
OPINION
“So long, suckers,” says Australia’s smiling assassin.
Walking through my suburb’s lifeless pedestrian mall on the way home from work last night, sidestepping tumbleweeds where small businesses are now shuttering on a near-daily basis, I caught the unmistakeable and very pungent whiff of an ill wind.
Look, I’m not a property analyst, nor am I an economist. I have no financial qualifications and no in-depth legislative or property law knowledge either.
So what do I know? Likely nothing. Only time will tell.
But passing another abruptly vacated commercial premise – a boutique clothing retailer located next to a garish pink matcha store whose curious survival until now does nothing to displace its neon-lit announcement of impending doom – I felt an unmistakeable chill down my hunched and withered Gen X spine.
“Uh oh,” I thought. “While everyone’s been distracted by the latest season of MAFs, the nation’s true unholy union has been breeding like rabbits!”
Another abandoned commercial premise.
These two sloppy desperados – our foreign investment laws and the smiling assassin’s new property IED (improvised explosive device) – now look to be wedded in a bad marriage that is, I suspect, going to be uglier to watch than whatever that nasty-sounding MAFS “fingerbang” episode was all about.
Take my suburb, which has had a commercial property problem for a long time.
I first became interested in the proliferation of empty shopfronts years ago, when I read that a group of locals was trying to persuade the new owner of the little local cinema to lease it to them so it could be reopened and serve the neighbourhood cinephiles. How good!
But the new owner was an overseas investor. She didn’t care at all that the property was gathering dust. She didn’t care that the community was permanently without its cinema. Evidently, she still doesn’t care, because all these years later, the cinema continues to sit empty, abandoned and forlorn since September 2013.
Mind those tumbleweeds!
The question of why an overseas investor would buy such a slice of commercial real estate in Australia, only to point-blank refuse to look for tenants to fill it with something people might actually want or need, is a mystery for the ages.
Another sad looking commercial strip. Generic Blacktown photos.
I’ve long assumed it was evidence of an overexposed loophole for wealthy overseas buyers to get their sticky mitts on the real prize: Australian citizenship, and with it access to the nation’s tempting smorgasbord of prestige residential titles, but I checked the relevant bits of the current legislation and that does not seem to be the case. Apparently we do not have a “citizenship by investment” model.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.
But we do have foreign investment aplenty in Australian real estate and nothing says “overseas buyer ghetto” quite like these long stretches of long-term shopfront vacancies, now visible everywhere I go and everywhere I look.
If the loophole to foreign investment is that they have to “buy into an Australian business”, then the hole is, in reality, a gaping maw, an ugly, insatiable Sarlacc slurping up commercial property sales with no intention of holding up the “business” end of the bargain.
You can’t miss the fact that commercial sites are languishing in huge numbers.
I don’t know how many of these empty premises are owned by nonresident and non-citizen investors but I suspect it’s a goodly few. And the last tenants were likely sent broke by the rent and overheads because “small business” is often just a euphemism for a couple of dreamers who watched too many Hugh Grant rom-coms featuring charming, quirky little uber niche businesses where no one makes a penny but the owner still gets to marry the biggest star in Hollywood so that’s all right then.
A young, dreamy, Hugh Grant in the iconic film, Love Actually. Photo: YouTube.
In reality, tenants can’t get their landlord to fix anything or lower the rent because the landlord either can’t afford the repairs or to lower the rent or in many cases really, self-evidently, doesn’t want the bother of an actual business operating on the premises. They just want the empty husk, once the Sarlacc has sucked out all the entrails and picked the bones clean.
Is it a problem, at a time when millions of Australians either can’t afford to buy a home or can’t quite afford the repayments on the home they did buy, that we are so willing to sell off untold amounts of real estate to people who don’t even live here and are not Australian, when their buying power and numbers surely must help drive up both commercial and residential property prices?
If you want a glimpse at the monstrous appetite for offloading Australian interests, the mining industry is currently estimated to be 86 per cent foreign owned! Eighty-six per cent! And that’s just mining – we’ve also blithely sold off whole islands, and farms you need a Cessna to see in full, to overseas interests.
Exactly how much of Australia is no longer even Australian at all?
And one of the things suffocated to death in all this – a silent death, because all its victims generally have no pride, no tears, and no more fight left by the end – has to be the nation’s small businesses, because would-be operators either can’t afford to buy the space, or cannot pay the extortionate rental prices for the lots advertised for rent, and nor are they likely to be able to raise overseas owners of empty commercial spaces whether they’re listed as available or not.
Small businesses struggle as commercial properties rent and mortgages become out of reach. Picture: Alan Barber
But that’s not where this problem ends, is it? It takes two to tango. Enter the smiling assassin’s residential property investment policy, skipping down the aisle to join hands with the foreign investment Sarlacc, with Australians merely the unwilling witnesses forced to watch Jim gleefully put a ring on it.
Because now joining all the For Lease signs in commercial zones at the altar of broken dreams is the alarming overnight proliferation of For Sale signs outside residential properties. And they aren’t selling. Homes in my area that guaranteed would have sold before auction at a premium just a couple of months ago are being passed in and the wilting, overlong display of sale signage out front is as shocking as fiction’s famous scarlet letter, only this one screeches SCREWED.
The combined portrait of inactivity in the market is bracing. This is not a scene of economic confidence or prosperity. People are under the pump.
I can’t help but spare a thought for those small operators, like the ones who woefully misjudged the size of the matcha market, but also the local baristas and the woman with the laundry at the end of the street who probably did a pretty solid trade washing and ironing business shirts pre-Covid. Chances are she has never quite recovered – people iron their own shirts now, and many have already stopped buying coffee too.
Jenkins slams Albo’s First Home Buyers Assistance scheme. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Even the perpetually packed cafe nearest to our place was empty the other morning. Not a soul in the place during their usually brisk breakfast trade. I’ve never seen that before. Not ever.
Add all that to this morning’s revelations that you don’t even need to be an Australian to access the First Home Buyers Assistance scheme and that’s not the smiling assassin and the Sarlacc’s joyously ribboned vintage wedding mobile driving happily through a thronging community of wellwishers, replete in their own good fortune to be living in the Lucky Country.
No, that’s a runaway clown car, careening out of control and kicking up noxious dust through the whisper quiet, boarded up streets of this sad and nameless place, where Australians’ well-earned retirement plans; decades of hard graft to ensure meaningful intergenerational wealth transfer; years of tough slog to try to reach long-term housing security and the spectre of drained savings caused by repeat bill shock, find themselves gathered shivering around this raging bin fire.
Mmmm. I really don’t think that’s confetti the crowds are throwing at the happy couple as they pass by.