Ten Businesses, One Building, One Night — and Still No Financial Support
Image The Herald Sun
The Victoria Street Business Association is asking the Victorian Government for direct financial assistance for the traders whose businesses were destroyed in the Victoria Street fire.
Advisory support has been secured. Council has committed to rate and fee relief. What has not arrived is capital — the money these business owners need to replace a fitout, restock, cover the months they cannot trade, and either relocate or return.
That gap is now the only thing standing between several of these traders and permanent closure.
What happened
In the early hours of the morning, offenders drove a vehicle into a ground-floor business on Victoria Street and set the building alight. Fire Rescue Victoria brought the blaze under control with around 80 firefighters and some 25 trucks. Around ten shops within the single building were affected.
Among them: two accounting practices, an optometrist, a Chinese medicine clinic, two massage businesses, a hair and beauty salon, two restaurants and a convenience store. Family businesses, most of them. Several had traded on this street for years.
Nobody was inside. That is the only good news in this account.
What the Association did
Within the first hour we identified which shops were alight and opened a communication channel for affected traders and committee members. By the end of that day we had established a single public information channel for Victoria Street, held a first meeting with traders, and taken briefings from Council and Police.
Within 24 hours we had briefed the Council CEO and councillor team, who adopted our plan of action, and escalated to the Premier and the relevant Minister. We met the Minister for Small Business in the first week.
Since then the work has been unglamorous and continuous: site access, suspension of utilities and leases, legal and financial support, and case-by-case assistance for every affected trader — in Vietnamese or English, whichever they need. Lease exits. Bond recovery. Tax Office engagement. Service Australia coordination. Decisions about whether to resume trading at all.
We are grateful to the Small Business Minister, Mayor and Councillor and Council Staff, Business Victoria to Police and Fire Rescue Victoria, and to the officers who have worked alongside us.
What has been secured, and what has not
Small business advisory assistance has been secured, modelled on the support offered after bushfire events. Council has committed to rate and fee rebates and other fee relief for businesses that remain on Victoria Street.
Both of those matter. Neither of them is money in a trader's hand.
Advice does not replace a destroyed fitout. A rate rebate does not help a business that has no premises to be rated on. Traders tell us that insurance has been the single hardest part of this — slow, contested, and in several cases well short of what rebuilding actually costs.
Two businesses have already relocated away from Victoria Street. More are deciding now. Every week without a clear answer on financial support makes that decision for them.
Why this case is different
We understand the Government's difficulty. Victoria Police have confirmed more than 100 properties firebombed across Melbourne and regional Victoria, the overwhelming majority of them single shopfronts. A government cannot write a cheque for every one.
But this event was not that. This was a single attack that destroyed an entire building of unrelated businesses in one night — an optometrist, an accountant, a massage therapist and a nail salon who had nothing to do with one another beyond sharing a roof, and nothing whatsoever to do with the reason the building was targeted.
That is the distinction we are asking Government to recognise. Not compensation for arson generally, but support triggered where a single attack causes multi-tenancy collateral loss on this scale. It is a narrow category. It is a defensible one. And it is the difference between a policy that holds and a policy nobody can afford to write.
The rebuild
Talks about rebuilding are underway. The Association's is helpping the traders with new vacant shops along the strip.
This needs to be settled now, while the rebuild is still being planned.
Where this stands
Victoria Street is a precinct that has already absorbed a great deal — reduced foot traffic, rising rents, and a shopfront vacancy rate that the City of Yarra's own analysis puts at around 22 per cent. It does not have ten businesses to spare.
We will keep working with Council, with the Minister's office and with the traders themselves. We are asking the Victorian Government to move, and to move before the electoral cycle closes the window on new commitments.
The Victoria Street Business Association represents traders across Richmond and Abbotsford in the City of Yarra. If your business was affected by the fire, or if you can assist affected traders with premises, contact the Association.
