Hobart’s Pub Banc Group has entered voluntary administration, standing down more than 80 staff and pulling seven venues out of the city’s hospitality and live music map in a single week.
The group’s venues take in Cargo Bar, Jack Greene, Post Street Social, Observatory Bar, Republic Bar, Franklin Wharf Restaurant and Bar, and the Franklin Wharf Function Centre, spread across Salamanca, the waterfront and North Hobart. Registered liquidator Adam Johnston of Hobart firm Apex Advisory has been appointed voluntary administrator, with trading halted while an urgent sale process runs. Several of the venues have since reopened, reportedly to slow crowds.
The reasons given will sound familiar. The group pointed to a long run of tough trading, with food and beverage input costs, utilities, insurance and other operating expenses all climbing, many of them sharply, at the same time as consumer spending shifted.
Two things make this worth flagging beyond Tasmania. The first is concentration risk. When a single group holds seven venues in a city the size of Hobart, one corporate failure can remove a large share of the local live capacity overnight, including Republic Bar, one of the best known rooms in the state. That is a structural exposure most cities now carry to some degree.
The second is that insurance is now being named in collapse notices, not just in surveys and submissions. ALMBC has been arguing for some time that insurance affordability and availability is a viability issue rather than a line item. This is what that argument looks like when it stops being theoretical.
