Nick Xenophon has responded to my email (and I am sure emails from others) supporting his private member’s bill on the issue of penalty rates:

Dear Mark

Thank you for your email to me regarding my proposed penalty rates Bill. I appreciate your support on this issue.

In recent months I have spoken to a number of small businesses and, importantly, employees about hours being reduced and jobs lost because of changes to penalty rates.

It is estimated penalty rates have already cost almost 3000 jobs in the hospitality industry. The recent Restaurant & Catering Australia Benchmarking Report also showed 18.2 per cent of businesses were closed on weekends due to penalty rates. More than two-thirds said they would cut the number of staff further if labour costs rose in the next 12 months.

My Bill will only apply to small businesses – those with fewer than 20 full-time equivalent employees in the hospitality and retail industries. Under my Bill, employees will earn penalty rates when they work more than 10 hours in a day or 38 hours in a week.

That way, employees will still be recognised for work they do above and beyond a usual week and small businesses will be able to stay open and keep employing staff for weekend shifts.

My Bill has been referred to the Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committees for an Inquiry.

The purpose of a Committee Inquiry is to critically analyse ideas from all sides of the debate and I would welcome your input into this. You can find out more information about the Committee inquiry here.

Even though both the Government and the Opposition have indicated they don’t support this proposal, I strongly believe this is an issue that needs to be publicly debated because of the thousands of jobs that have already been lost in small businesses.

Thank you for taking the time to write to me on this issue.

We need more newsagents supporting this private member’s bill. We can do it by telling our local members to support the bill. We can also do it by making a submission to the committee.

I have been fortunate to spend the last two days in Tasmania, in Launceston and Hobart, presenting at the ANF mini conference and participating in the GNS organised trade displays.

The photo does not do the trade display justice. There were many more suppliers in attendance, bringing to Tasmania a flavour of the mainland Market Fairs.

Our channel has some strong newsagents in Tasmania, people embracing change. It also has some old school newsagents who need to create their own future.  The day in Hobart and Thursday in Launceston brought together some excellent product opportunities, business management opportunities and some good networking.

I am grateful to GNS and the ANF for being included in the events.

Newsagents I spoke with in Perth on Monday has mixed reviews of Sunday trading which started this past weekend in Western Australia.  Some were thrilled with the sales while others were concerned that labour costs would see it loss-making day for them.

While I do wish there was a solution to paying double time on Sundays (we should support Nick Xenophon’s private member’s bill on this) we need to structure our businesses for success.

Sundays are an opportunity, especially in shopping centres and on busy high streets as they bring traffic we would otherwise not see.

• Greet your customers. With so many new faces on a Sunday you need to given them a memorable (in a good way) customer service experience.
• Sunday deals. Consider Sunday only promotions. This shows the business as offering value and leverages the bonus traffic. Promote these outside your business.
• Schedule Sunday work. Ensure there is work for your team if the shop is not busy. Bring forward some weekday work to Sundays.
• Look at your data. Once you have some Sundays under your belt delve into your data and understand what’s different about this day.  I often see opportunities not available on other days of the week.

In any market with Sunday trading small and independent retailers like newsagents need to suck it up and embrace the opportunity.

There was a time when owning a TV broadcast licence was a licence to print money. As if the many cable competitors and the downloading of TV shows were not enough competition for free to air, the networks are now faced with video on demand.

Check out the story at gigaom about the re-launch of Arrested Development (a brilliant sitcom) on the Netflix VOD platform. This and similar moves with other shows is developing VOD as a platform to compete with the traditional distribution channel.

The reminder for me is that none of us can run our businesses expecting traditional supply channels to work for us in the future. How people buy much of what we sell is changing rapidly … as is happening in TV.