On Monday morning, more than 80 Hobart hospitality workers were told to go home. The Pub Banc Group had collapsed into voluntary administration, and seven of the city’s best-known venues – Cargo Bar, Jack Greene, Post Street Social, the Observatory Bar, the Republic, and both Franklin Wharf operations – stopped trading on the spot.

(Editor’s note: At the time of publishing, administrators Apex Advisory announced that three of the Hobart waterfront venues – Cargo Bar, Jack Greene, and Post Street Social – will reopen this weekend for a final period of trading. Beyond this weekend, the administrators are exploring an urgent sale process for the venues.)

I run a bakery and cafe in Claremont. When I read the group’s statement blaming rising food and beverage costs, utilities, insurance and “a marked shift in consumer spending behaviour”, I didn’t need it translated. I pay those same bills. Every operator in Tasmania got the same insurance renewal letters, the same energy contracts, the same supplier price rises. All of that is real.

But it’s only half the story, and the half left out is the one Hobart needs to hear.

The squeeze comes from both ends.

“Consumer spending behaviour has changed” is corporate language for something simpler: our customers ran out of spare money. Hospitality doesn’t sell anything anyone needs. We sell the part of life that happens after the rent, the mortgage, the power bill and the groceries are paid – and for a growing share of Tasmanian households, there is nothing left after that list. When people talk about the cost-of-living crisis in the abstract, this is what it looks like in the concrete – a quiet Tuesday, then a quiet Friday, then a padlocked door on Salamanca.

So a venue in 2026 is squeezed from both ends at once. Costs rising through the floor, customers disappearing through the door. A cafe or a pub is the canary in the coal mine of household budgets – we feel the recession in people’s wallets months before it shows up in any official statistic.

The timing deserves attention too. On July 1, Payday Super came into effect, requiring superannuation to be paid with every pay run rather than quarterly. In my business we’ve paid super every pay run for years – it was never complicated, and it was never our money to sit on. But plenty of businesses around the country had been quietly using that quarterly float as working capital – an interest-free loan, drawn from their own workers’ retirement savings, that the workers never agreed to make. On July 1, that buffer vanished overnight. Pub Banc called in the administrators five days later. I don’t know their books, but insolvency specialists had been predicting exactly this wave, in exactly this industry, at exactly this moment. If your business only stands up while it’s leaning on the staff’s super, it was already falling.

MAKERS AND TAKERS

Here’s the part I can only say because I’ve spent 25 years being self-employed, most of it with flour on my hands.

There are two kinds of hospitality businesses.

One is built and run by its maker – the person who created it, who knows the regulars by name, who notices when the coffee’s off before a customer does, and who, when times shrink, responds the way makers always have – roll the sleeves up, work the floor, take less out, hold the team together. The other kind is run from a spreadsheet.

The venue is a line item, the staff are a cost centre, and when the numbers turn, the response isn’t extra effort – it’s an administrator.

I make no claim about how any particular group was run – the creditors’ report will tell that story in time.

But I’ll say this as a general truth – a spreadsheet has never once poured a beer, calmed an angry customer, or stayed back to help a young worker finish their close. When margins were fat, the difference between the two models was invisible.

In times like these, it’s everything.

WHO WEARS THE LOSS?

The administrators say these are “iconic venues with strong brands, prime locations and loyal patronage” and expect strong buyer interest. They’re right – the brands will survive. Someone will buy the Republic – Hobart won’t let one of its longest-running live music rooms die.

But notice who carries the weight while the assets change hands. Eighty-plus workers stood down without notice in the middle of winter. Local suppliers – the farmers, brewers, bakers and distributors of Southern Tasmania – lining up as unsecured creditors, hoping for cents in the dollar. Couples who paid function deposits for weddings, now told to wait for “official guidelines”. Musicians with gigs booked at the Republic through winter and spring, whose Hobart dates just evaporated. The people who least could afford the loss absorb it, while the “assets” are polished for sale. That pattern isn’t unique to hospitality. It’s the pattern of our whole economy right now.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

My hope is simple – that the next owners of these seven venues are makers, not takers. People who will stand behind their own bars. Hobart’s venues aren’t investment products – they’re where this city celebrates, grieves, votes, dates and hears its own musicians. They deserve owners who understand that, and they deserve customers with enough left over at the end of the fortnight to walk through the door.

Government can’t fix a venue’s menu. But it can fix the reason the room is empty. Until our politicians treat the household squeeze as the emergency it is, Monday’s padlocks won’t be the last.

Wayne Hawkins owns Crisp N’ Sweet bakery and cafe, in Claremont, and

has been self-employed in Tasmania for 20 years