PRESIDENT UPDATE
Paul Jubb - THA President
For Tasmanian hospitality businesses, closing the border at short notice is devastating. It means thousands of dollars in refunds and credits, events cancelled, food gone to waste, staff shifts cut and a heightened sense of uncertainty for everyone. But the frustrations extend even further for operators. The borders close so the virus can’t reach our shores but our venues still can’t trade to their full capacity even with local, low risk patrons. Tasmanian venues are still locked up by restrictions, even when other states are in lockdown. We’ve seen what a good contact tracing system can do. Within 48 hours of the Victorian outbreak, contact tracers had identified 10,000 close contacts. The Tasmanian Government rolled out their own mandatory app to all places of public gathering, a process the THA supported. The Premier says that 6,000 Tasmanian businesses were still yet to register for the Check In TAS app. We’d implore every business and event to comply with the requirements to accelerate the recovery not just for hospitality but for the whole of the economy. We believe the vast majority of hospitality venues are among the 17,000 using the Check In TAS app and many venues have been mandatory contact tracing since last November with no reward for effort.
This is one box our industry needs to tick in order for Public Health to have the confidence to open up our industry. Just as we did in the height of the pandemic, it’s about coming together, doing the right thing, and looking after each other to get through this time and out the other side. We would support the Government stepping up workplace checks to make sure businesses have the Check In TAS systemandare using it. Our counterparts in Victoria (AHA Vic) have launched the ‘NO TICK NO ENTRY’ Hospitality Registry, a campaign in which venues commit to only serving customers who register their details for contact tracing purposes. If that’s what it takes to get our restrictions eased, we would look at a similar system in Tasmania. But at this stage, Public Health aren’t giving us benchmarks to reach or a roadmap out. Hospitality people are proud people, they’ll do everything they can to keep the doors open. It’s their livelihoods. But the threat of closure is getting greater than the threat of the virus for many in the industry. This edition of the Hospitality Review Magazine is the #StandUpforHospitality edition, a campaign started to lobby Public Health to ease the restrictions in late 2020 and now reignited to see the further lifting of restrictions. There is more from Tasmanian hospitality operators on how the restrictions are impacting their business on page 20-23.
It’s an easy requirement to adhere to – Register for a QR code, encourage customers to use it and play your part in keeping the community safe.
THA HOSPITALITY—REVIEW: JUNE 2021 | 5
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online