A springboard for Liz Davenport

Leading Australian fashion designer Liz Davenport has joined a select group of business leaders to receive an Australia day honour for service to their respective industries.

Davenport has been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the fashion industry, and the community.

And after 35 years dealing with the day-to-day realities of a sector driven by manufacturing and retailing, Davenport is set to use the recognition to fight for the rights of her fellow independent retailers. She wants to set up a group of retailers to help counter the "absolutely disgraceful” treatment she says they receive from shopping centre managers.

"I would like to start a group of independents that have the power to lease as a bloc, or the power of a voice as a bloc, to buck the system that has developed as part of the retail sector,” she says.

The Australia Day honour comes as Davenport prepares to launch a new website to capitalise on the growing online retail market.

"Online will become a bigger and bigger thing, so it's very exciting,” she says.

Davenport also threw her support behind the retail industry's campaign, led by Harvey Norman executive chairman Gerry Harvey, to see the removal of a GST threshold on overseas online purchases valued under $1,000.

She says the government is too short-sighted to see it is missing out on stamp duty and GST and called on it to fix the issue that also sees some retailers having to do more accounting work than others.

"If people are having to comply with onerous business compliance, why should somebody be able to step in and avoid that when others have to do it?”

The fashion sector has changed dramatically in Australia since the days when women sparked controversy by choosing to wear pants into Parliament, says Davenport, with comfort now triumphing over couture.

The biggest shift for the sector was the wholesale move of clothing manufacturing offshore, something Davenport says was inevitable.

"All of our product up until five years ago was manufactured in Australia, but it became almost impossible to do that,” she says, adding that wages in Australia are no longer even close to those in other manufacturing-driven countries.

"Successive governments did not encourage the clothing industry, which was a tragedy because it was the highest employer of migrant women and it meant that it took away a whole industry that they could be employed in.”

Davenport's Australia Day honour adds to a raft of awards the fashion veteran has received, including a Grand Award from the Fashion Industries of Australia, and an Advance Australia Award for contribution to lifestyle through fashion.

But this one is special, says Davenport, inspiring her to get cracking on an overseas expansion project she already has in the pipeline, and a project designed to help the wool industry.

Oh, and there's also the two books to finish and magazine she'd like to launch in her spare time.

"This just gives me the courage to make sure it happens,” she says.