As if lockdowns were not enough. Floods along the east coast of Australia have hit local economies over the last few months. As our Spendmapp subscribers can see in the recently uploaded March spending data, the impact has been terrible.
Figure 1 shows the spending in one NSW Spendmapp council (we’ll keep them anonymous). You can see the lockdown effects in August (a drop of around 22% in local spending compared with what should have been expected that time of year). With the flood impacts in March 2022, though, the drop is over 50%.
This is turnover that is not going to the local traders across the LGA.
By contrast, Resident Online Spend increased by 11% from February to March 2022 (Figure 2). In a typical year it drops a little into March (perhaps due to the post-Christmas belt-tightening). In this particular local area, these impacts mean that around $42 million was lost from the local economy compared with a typical March level of expenditure. Of this drop of $42 million, around $3 million went to online traders elsewhere, and the rest just disappeared.
Every local economy hit by floods will have seen their local traders’ incomes drop. Spendmapp users can quantify the scale of the impact and, from this, seek grant and other funding to help rebuild their local economies.
