Pub baron praises government for keeping industry afloat
Pub owner and former Liberal Party politician, Craig Laundy, has commended the speedy efforts of the state governments and industry bodies for putting in place policies and guidelines to keep the hospitality sector afloat.
Laundy, along with his father Arthur, runs a family pub empire, which includes two pubs: Daniel San and Parkhouse Mona Vale.
He told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that “any time an industry loses 10-11 weeks of business, it’s not good”.
Back in December 2020, as soon as the northern beaches outbreak started to become an issue, Laundy rang John Whelan, NSW chief executive of the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) and said he was closing down his pubs “immediately”.
Referring to the industry as a whole, Laundy said "Even before the NSW Premier Gladys [Berejiklian] closed down the northern beaches, we shut down pubs. We acted very responsibly as an industry, working closely with the [NSW] government to make sure we can help them get on top of things.
“We understood that if we didn’t get on top of things, the damage to our businesses longer term would be far greater.”
Laundy believes all levels of government have worked well together to keep the pandemic contained.
“Scott [Morrison, the Prime Minister] and Josh [Frydenberg, the federal Treasurer] realised quickly that Centrelink is not built nor constructed to handle mass unemployment, mass retrenchments and mass redundancy, to basically outsource that functionality to the private sector – knowing that industry has a direct link to employees, we became the distributor of JobKeeper effectively and that propped up the whole economy,” Laundy says.
“Being an ex-politician and having sat on several Council of Australian Governments (COAG) panels with state and territories ministers and walking away frustrated predominantly, I think we got a great demonstration of how our forebears, who set up our Federation, intended it to work.”
What would make Laundy happy is the continued investment into the industry.
Despite national, state and regional lockdowns, investors have poured close to $1 billion into pubs around the country, with a surge in pub sales in Sydney in October as soon as venues were operating close to normal trade.
In Sydney, pubs are held equally by large family interests and investors, which is contrary to Melbourne where pubs are in the hands of private families and sports stars who tend to hold onto the properties long-term.
There have been several deals done in Sydney during the pandemic including Sam Arnout’s purchase of the Narwee hotel in Sydney's south for $45 million and Justin Hemme’s $32 million acquisition of the Duke of Gloucester in Randwick in Sydney’s east.
There is a connection between Arnaout and Laundy.
In 2019, Arnaout through Iris Capital paid $65 million for the Hotel Steyne in Manly on the northern beaches. The hotel was sold by a consortium of the Laundy family, businessman John Singleton and investors Mark Carnegie and Robert Whyte.
The Laundys are now moving more towards development with several new sites including Marsden Brewhouse in western Sydney and the Log Cabin Hotel in Penrith in Sydney’s west.
“The demand is coming from the historic low interest rates and the ability to add value to some of these pubs that have not been able to do the projects in the past,” Laundy says.
Irit Jackson, 2nd February 2021
