THOUGHT I had picked up a decades’ old newspaper when I saw the frontpage headline of last week’s Bulletin: “Business Killer!”
Alas, serial anti-free-trading and special-interest campaigner Steere Street Deli owner Darcy Buckle was repeating the same rhetoric he espoused in 2014 after the first granting of extended trading hours for businesses in Collie.
According to Mr Buckle then and now, Collie small businesses are doomed if entrepreneurs and consumers are allowed to enjoy the same shopping freedoms as their city cousins.
Mr Buckle’s special-interest arguments against free-market reforms are the same today as all special-interest arguments have always been and will always be no matter what the subject.
When I came to Collie from Perth in 2008 as a shift worker, it absolutely amazed me that after noon on a Saturday until Monday downtown Collie was pretty much a ghost town, in spite of having two competing supermarkets, and we working people, tourists, visitors and the like were forced to travel to Bunbury to shop.
Today, in spite of some, including some so-called “business people”, the people of Collie and surrounding areas enjoy a town that is open seven days a week and at times conducive to the needs of consumers, and no matter if it’s a Saturday or a Sunday, downtown Collie is no longer a ghost town.
It’s going on nine years since Mr Buckle first made his dire predictions about small businesses in Collie, but still it appears he has managed to survive and prosper in his business, to which we say well done and thank you, because it’s not easy for any business, big or small, to survive in the face of ever-increasing government-induced costs.
I, for one, hope that the viability of both Coles and Woolworths in Collie can be maintained so that we can continue to enjoy the price and choice benefits of competition and other flow-ons, including employment of locals.
Let local businesses trade when they want to and consumers shop local when they want to!

Don Scott
Collie