Having a voice for your small business is important, and a professional industry association like ALNA that is in there batting for you with government, regulators and suppliers can make a real difference for your business.
In recent times ALNA has been very successful at getting new legislation passed to help our members, for example, we championed ‘Unfair Contract Terms’ legislation being successfully extended to include small businesses. We also pushed for those protections to be extended making unfair terms in our members standard form contracts illegal.
We had our ‘Uber moment’ fighting ‘synthetic’ or ‘fake’ lottery bets being sold by online bookmakers, which threatened our most important foot traffic driver in members stores. We stopped that from happening by getting cross party support federally for amended legislation to close the loophole and to protect our members.
Another recent example was our capacity to make sure that in almost every situation, our members were not impacted by store closures during the COVID pandemic. We advocated directly to state Premiers, and all the way up to speaking directly to the Deputy Prime Minister about this, to ensure we were classified as essential services and not forced to close.
We are constantly doing submissions to different consultations advocating on issues impacting our members. Another example is the cost of accepting payments skyrocketing, we have done multiple submissions to reduce these costs and we have been able to get lower costs for members and the ability for them to choose the least cost option for payments when customers tap their cards.
We have submitted to several inquiries into the use of credit cards for gambling, making the case that lottery purchases are very different to other forms of gambling. They are very low harm, and like the UK where they have been exempted from similar reforms, we have successfully advocated that they should be treated differently here as well. Stopping these bans has been very beneficial for our members.
We negotiate with our suppliers to find win-win outcomes and to improve members’ remuneration, and we collectively negotiate under our ACCC bargaining authorisation on behalf of our member businesses.
A final example of the work we are doing, is getting the government to stop criminal gangs from undermining our legitimate retailers by illegally importing illicit tobacco products into our country. This is flagrantly undermining preventative health policies by undercutting legitimate retailers’ businesses and selling these illegal products to minors. ALNA is working with a range of other retail associations and government to wipe out this activity.
As you can see, we are a strong voice protecting you and your small business, which is critical to your profitability and your long-term success. There is strength in being part of our team.
