COMMENTAustralia is increasingly losing its sense of community – and it’s becoming obvious in the closure of local businesses.The bigger we become, mostly due to migration, the fewer connections to our local community we seem to have.Last week’s announcement by brewing giant Lion that it would shut its James Boag brewery in Launceston was yet another sad example of this phenomenon – the closure of a 145-year-old institution that had been brewing beer specifically for people in northern Tasmania, because it’s cheaper to do it on the mainland.Family-owned Sydney mattress manufacturer A.H. Beard also went into voluntary administration in April after 126 years of making its products locally.The cost of Australian manufacturing and a shift towards cheaper, imported mattresses were blamed.And this week, we learnt that hundreds of Barbeques Galore workers now face an uncertain future after the iconic Aussie chain announced it would shut 62 of its stores.The retailer – founded in 1976 – went into voluntary administration in February, and a last-ditch deal to save it collapsed this month.Meanwhile, at a smaller scale, small businesses that serve local communities are shutting in alarming numbers.The Institute of Public Affairs recently calculated that between June 2022 and June 2025, there was a net loss of about 33,500 small businesses – that is despite an exploding population during that time.Two industries suffered an overall decline in the number of businesses last financial year – agriculture, forestry and fishing, and retail.A dwindling retail sector means fewer shops serving their communities.Meanwhile, corporate insolvencies have increased 200 per cent since 2022.You may say that’s just the way of the world. Times are tough, and people shop online now, so small businesses will naturally shutter.But I don’t think that’s a good thing. Yes, you cannot stop progress – but it is possible for progression to go so far that it starts turning into regression and I fear, insofar as it pertains to social cohesion, we’ve hit that point.Economies of scale just mean that it’s harder and harder to create a local product for a local market because, on the whole, it’s cheaper to mass produce something and sell lots of it.It is likewise more cost effective to have a big shop that sells many things without any sense of personal service – and even better to sell online instead.One element of it is the cost of doing business in Australia, which is huge – particularly if you’re a small business.It’s hard to open a business, let alone keep it open.But it’s also the fracturing of society. The face of our nation has changed fundamentally due to big population growth driven by migration.Even though we’re living closer and closer together, because we keep packing more people into the same space, we’re actually just moving further apart.Unfortunately, I don’t think people are as connected to their local communities as they used to be – and the closure of places like the Boag’s brewery are both a symptom and a cause.We lose our local icons because it’s too expensive to serve the local community and then by losing our local icons, we lose the things that connect people in a community.This is yet another marker of societal decline.You lose the local butcher, because he can’t afford to sell his meat for less than the supermarket. We’re all in for the cheaper meat, and fair enough. But you lose a local business that looked after local people, and so you lose a community touchpoint.On and on this goes until, eventually, you have nothing local left and people feel no connection to the businesses with which they interact. And so they stop interacting with the people around them and they feel no connection to the community at all.Notwithstanding the sense of community that is still present and stronger outside of the capital cities, I worry that local pride is being erased. State pride, as an example, is being erased because we’re all just part of one big Australia where everyone’s welcome. We don’t have a common thread and anything goes.And some of you might say, well, get over it – that’s just the world in which we now live.Maybe I am yearning for a world that doesn’t exist anymore and I should get over it. But I don’t want to get over it.That’s not the world I want to live in. It’s not the community I want to live in.We lament that social cohesion is worse than it has ever been, and yet we keep destroying the things that can connect communities.But does anyone care?