Business
19 March, 2026
New business chamber chair trying to foster good relations
New chair of Business Southern Highlands Greg Welsh sat down with The Southern Wire to have an exclusive chat about the Chamber’s plans for the near and more distant future, and plans to foster better relationships with small businesses in the Southern Highlands community as well as with Wingecarribee Shire Council, and State and Federal government.
New chair of Business Southern Highlands Greg Welsh sat down with The Southern Wire to have an exclusive chat about the Chamber’s plans for the near and more distant future, and plans to foster better relationships with small businesses in the Southern Highlands community as well as with Wingecarribee Shire Council, and State and Federal government.
So, Greg, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and what attracted you to the Southern Highlands?
“I’m a ‘retired gentleman’ and my wife and I moved down here to the Southern Highlands to retire,” he said.
“My wife would argue I haven’t really done that very well! But I feel I should be doing ‘little bits and pieces’ here and there, because I want to be part of the community. We spent a month in nearly everywhere in NSW to decide where we wanted to move out of Sydney and retire, and after three or four visits to the Highlands, we loved it here so much we decided to stay.Unless you make a conscious effort to be part of the community, you don’t become deeply embedded within it.”
And in terms of the Chamber, what are your plans moving forward?
“I was on the committee at GROW, which is the rural chamber of commerce for want of a better term,” Mr. Welsh said.
“Business Southern Highlands is the commercial side of it in town, and what I am trying to do is make sure the towns are vibrant and make sure there’s employment across the whole community here.
“I don’t want to walk down the street when I'm an old retired guy and see closed shops – that's part of what you’ve got to guard against in many regional towns – if you can do it by keeping it vibrant and bringing in the tourists from outside, and making the money circulate properly through the community, then the shops make the money, the people spend the money doing up their houses, they go to the footy with their kids, and everything’s interconnected.”
He also emphasised that the chambers are the ‘antennae’ of the community.
“It’s our job to go to council and advocate for stuff because the small business guys often can't and haven’t got the leverage to do it,” he said.
“If we are hearing something in the community that’s an issue, it’s our job to go to council and say, ‘hey this is what we’re hearing’ and then try and work with council to produce a solution. Yes, we’ll disagree sometimes, because that’s part of community concerns, but our job is to go in there with solutions and not just ‘fling mud’”.
Mr Welsh says he meets with council regularly to see what is working and what isn’t.
“We have honest conversations, which is really good,” he said.
“Frank and honest conversations without the politics and without ‘playing the man’ - I think that’s what works well between a solid chamber and Council, that we have that frank conversation.”
How will your term as chair be judged, i.e., what goals do you feel the chamber needs to meet?
There are three things we want to achieve – we really want to grow the chamber itself to be far bigger than what it is,” he said.
“Being truly representative, but also having the people at the networking events – that's our way to actually tap in.
“This then means we’re getting the best possible broad opinion of what business needs, so that we then go back and do our advocacy work and know that we’re doing it properly.
“When we then get a result out of it- then the member goes ‘oh well you guys are actually doing a reasonable job – the chamber’s worthwhile and I'll get my mates to join’, and we end up with a much larger more robust chamber, and the most easily recognisable goal at the end of the day is - do the members feel they getting value for money out of the chamber?”
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