Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Nick Reece has defended the city centre as an “incredible” place to do business, after the founder of the Laurent bakery empire said violence and drug use are “killing” the state capital.
Speaking to the Herald Sun this month, Laurent Boillon revealed plans to scale back Laurent’s retail footprint from 17 stores to 12, with its CBD outpost among those to close.
“I can’t be bothered, it’s too hard”, Boillon said, reportedly pointing to elevated rents, overheads, and antisocial behaviour working against businesses in the city centre.
The “level of violence and drugs” is “killing Melbourne”, he told the masthead.
Boillon, voted the EY Entrepreneur of the Year for 2025, is not the only business leader to fear for trading conditions in the state capital.
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Speaking to the same paper last year, chef Jessi Singh said his CBD restaurant Daughter in Law was broken into dozens of times in 2025 alone.
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Data from the state government’s Crime Statistics Agency shows criminal incidents recorded in the City of Melbourne council area jumped by 24.4% to 34,556 in the year ending March 2025.
The number of reports dropped by 3.2% in the year to March 2026, but criminal incidents recorded per 100,000 people remained higher than the long-term average.
Responding to Boillon’s comments and concerns about crime affecting inner-city traders, Lord Mayor Nick Reece told SmartCompany that inner-city safety is a “top priority”.
The City of Melbourne hired 11 community safety officers (CSOs) in 2025 to monitor and de-escalate troubling behaviour in hotspots across the CBD.
While those CSOs do not have full powers bestowed to Victoria Police officers, they have the authority to issue infringement notices, and in high-risk circumstances, perform citizen’s arrests until badged police officers arrive.
The council has since doubled the number of CSOs and expanded its CCTV camera network, in what Reece called the “biggest safety investment in Council’s history”.
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“Business owners and workers tell me every day that our CSOs are making a real difference – supporting vulnerable people and preventing antisocial behaviour,” he said.
City CSOs have conducted more than 7,300 interactions since 2025, or an average of 50 per day.
The Lord Mayor also pointed to recent honours, like Time Out‘s designation of Melbourne as the world’s most livable city in 2026, as evidence it remains “an incredible place to do business”.
“Spend and visitation numbers continue to smash records, while our shopfront vacancies are among the lowest of any Australian capital city,” he said.
At the state level, laws introduced in 2025 create new offences for assaulting or threatening to assault customer-facing workers, with penalties stretching up to five years’ imprisonment.
The law creates summary offences for verbal abuse against workers, with the courts capable of handing down sentences of six months behind bars.
The state government has also introduced more protective services officers in suburban shopping centres, in response to an alarming spate of violent incidents.
With rising overheads and concerns over violence and drugs convincing Boillon to cease trading in the CBD, the Herald Sun reports the Laurent retail business will turn its focus to shopping centres further afield.