Good evening ladies and gentlemen. As President of VACC, can I add my voice of welcome to you all.
We feel very privileged and honoured to see so many friends of the motor industry joining us here this evening.
This night – the VACC President’s Dinner - has been a feature of VACC’s calendar for many years.
Last year, some of you may know, was VACC’s 90th Anniversary. This night then is VACC’s 91st Annual Dinner. They won’t have all looked like this though. I suspect the first few may have been little more than a bit of a nosh at the local pub.
As for me, I have been President now for nearly a year. While many of you may know me through your dealings with VACC, many I am sure do not.
I am privileged to be the first country-based President of VACC for decades, which I am quite proud of. I represent a micro-business; a husband and wife team – my wife Dawn and family are here tonight.
And, in many ways, my experience with the motor industry is typical of many of VACC’s members.
The fact that I am standing here addressing you now is a testament to the way this organisation works and its core values in representing small business.
VACC was built on the efforts of “the small guy”… the small business pushing against the big end of town, and pushing to be heard by Government.
From my own point of view, it is remarkable the changes that I have seen over the forty-or-so years I have been in the industry. My history with VACC and the motor industry is pretty typical of many smaller VACC members.
I did my apprenticeship in Croydon in the ‘60s – it seems a heck of a long time ago now - and soon after I set myself up with my own workshop.
I was a really young bloke at the time. Dawn and I had married not long before, and I was keen on two things: to stand on my own two feet and to get involved in the industry.
I remember ringing up Frank Hannan who was a VACC membership officer and telling him that I wanted to join. Frank came around, took one look at my business and said, “I can’t sign you up Graeme, you’re a backyarder.”
So, I had to get a proper shop-front and workshop, which I did, and joined VACC soon after. And Frank came out again to sign me up.
These days, my wife Dawn and I run a small automotive workshop and service station at Gunbower on the Murray. We’ve been there now for thirty-odd years.
When you hear politicians and economists talking about micro-businesses, they’re talking about businesses like mine - Starcross Motors – if you’re ever driving through Gunbower, came in and have a chat.
Dawn and I, and thousands like us, have spent our working lives self-employed. We essentially work for wages, investing a little back into the business when we can afford it, and bobbing up and down on the fortunes of the economy like corks on the ocean.
And, over the years, I have to say, it hasn’t been an easy ride.
Nothing in business is easy. It certainly has its rewards but no-one goes into business thinking they’d like a bit of a rest.
For us, where we are, in a small regional community, with a relatively confined customer base, we’re exposed more than most to fluctuations in the broader economy, and also to the ups and downs in the local economy.
When things start to tighten, we feel it first.
Micro-businesses are up the front of the economic bus – if you want to know how a community is travelling, just talk to anyone running a business like ours.
Whether it’s from drought, that we’ve had now for ten years or more on the Murray, or floods, fire, pestilence or economic meltdown, it’s the micro-businesses who feel the tightening of household purse-strings first.
It is interesting having gone through a year such as the one we’ve just been through.
Are we in a recession? Apparently not, Australia, fortunately, appears to have ‘skated through’ the global financial crisis.
But come up my way, and I will show you a community in recession.
To my thinking, it is impossible to talk about the economy in strictly general terms … as though you can throw a blanket over the whole of the country.
In the broader economy, there are a whole lot of smaller economies – pockets where things are travelling well, and pockets where they are not.
I love our community on the Murray and the lifestyle up there. I wouldn’t swap it for the world. But, like small communities dotted all over regional Australia, we’re certainly in recession, and have been now for a long time.
We’re not all walking around with long faces though… we’re tough enough to get through it … but like smaller regional communities everywhere we’re losing ground.
It is simply fact. And we can’t look forward to a local building boom or some big political announcement of “a new IT venture”, or a new “high-tech business park” to drag us out.
Things my way will improve when irrigation water levels go back to normal, the price of milk improves and all the dairy farms begin to thrive again… and when all the families that have moved away, move back, and fill up the school, and do all their shopping at the local store.
But it won’t happen.
There is a bit of a tragedy in that, in the way life is changing for many regional communities.
Some small communities have lost too many pieces from the jig-saw, and the local economy simply won’t support itself.
So the General Store closes, then the service station because no-one is coming into town to shop, a few more families move away, then the school closes.
Let me tell you a little joke which illustrates how bad the financial situation is.
It is the month of August, on the Banks of the Murray. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.
Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a $100 note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.
The hotel proprietor takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.
The pig grower takes the $100 note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
The supplier of feed and fuel takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the town hooker that in these hard times, gave her service on credit.
The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the $100 note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she bought her clients there.
The hotel proprietor then lays the $100 note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his $100 note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.
No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Western world is doing business today.
Of course, there are winners and losers. Some of the larger regional towns are doing very well. And business within them is thriving.
But I think I can correctly say that because political power along the Eastern seaboard is won and lost in the cities, Government and policy-making is increasingly city-centric.
I hope that that might change. I hope that as President of VACC, as a voice of regional small business in this organisation, that, in some very very small way, I can put another view on the table when we are talking to Government and regulators, and influence some of that policy making.
So, I am very proud to be here. Over the years, I have done thousands upon thousands of miles driving back and forth from Gunbower to VACC.
The great strength of VACC is that a bloke representing a small regional business - like me - can find a voice in this organisation, can rise through our Committees, and become President.
I am also proud of VACC’s achievements. And certainly proud to join the long line of Presidents, dating right back to 1918, who have made such a difference over so many years.
I hope that I might also make a small difference. So, thank you for your continued support and friendship. I hope we have many more opportunities to meet and to share ideas.
My best wishes to you all.