TBAR TALK

A QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER FOR HUTCHIES’ TOOWOOMBA STAFF WINTER 2023

Welcome to our EOFY edition of Tbar Talk. I can’t believe we are halfway through another year already! The EOFY is always a time for me to reflect, as I do a lot of financial analysis of the year that’s been, financial planning for the year that’s upcoming and do about two months’ worth of performance reviews where I get to talk to everyone in the business. After doing that, I am always left with what feels like a fair amount of clarity of where we are at as a team and as a business. As well as feeling fairly energised by it all. This year, perhaps more than any other, I am left feeling very optimistic about what we have achieved over the past year and how strong we are as a unit. I reckon we are better right across the paddock now than we have ever been. Thanks again for everyone’s efforts over the last 12 months, it has been as challenging a time as I have seen and the results are amazing, especially when considering the difficulties.

It is, however, my anticipation that the challenges will remain similar for the next few years. The QLD Government has launched an unprecedented spend of circa $7B in Health Infrastructure across the state, at a time where labour and material shortages are still creating issues on our projects. This infrastructure will do a lot of good for the community, but also put pressure on our industry. Specifically, with the new Toowoomba Hospital being around $1.4B of that expenditure (which has now been awarded), the labour and material constraints in our region are likely to get worse before they get better. What will come from this is pricing volatility, a general increase in labour costs (as businesses try and compete on labour rates to retain staff), not enough labour to support the volume of work, and supply chain constraints. This will in turn mean that our focus areas of the last few years such as subbie relationships,