It just seems so strange to spend so much money saving a sector for the last year, then just cut it off with no material change in the conditions that led to the assistance in the first place. Itād be a much smaller scale program if you targeted it at the industries still directly impacted.
Taper off the support once recovery starts to happen - like if we get full regional bubbles in place, you can drop support back a bit, etc.
Having the phase out of support at least matching the vaccine rollout schedule would be a good way to balance this risk.
Needing to be flexible with plans is an okay substitute for it being generally safe to be holidaying in Australia, in plenty of other countries itād be reckless to even consider travelling far away from home.
There needs to be a move towards specific sector support rather than the somewhat blanket nature of the original JobKeeper - but it probably also needs to involve the state government as well. What will make this difficult is that these will be industries where recovery is some way off (if at all) and there has been limited desire to not put some kind of end on these support packages
Taking the politics out of it, if the states are happy for the federal government to take control of the stateās sovereignty on caps and limits and border controls to the feds, then sure the feds can fund it.
No use funding something if you donāt properly control it.
The material change could be the recovery and skills shortages in other industries. Many industries, including mine, are cancelling work because of shortages of workers due to migrant worker/ backpacker bans and jobkeeper keeping Australian workers at home. A job not created should be treated with the same concern as a job lost.
If an industry hasnāt recovered now they probably wonāt recover for a long time to come. All I see job keeper doing is protecting unviable jobs and preventing viable job creation.
Sure - which seems to have been the point of the original request from the Queensland government that kicked off this discussion - tourism is uniquely impacted so needs a tailored support package.
The structure of taxation makes this largely a federal issue - the main revenue benefits of jobs go to federally collected taxes, and the nature of COVID has hit the bigger state sources of revenue.
For most businesses yes, like if a restaurant or retail business hasnāt bounced back by now, they probably arenāt viable and donāt need support - but thereās sectors that have forces beyond their control still substantially limiting their capacity.
If thereās a skills drain from tourism sectors because there isnāt support for it, those jobs wonāt return, either for a very long time, or forever. For big cities thatās probably something you can absorb and they would slowly bounce back over time - but thereās plenty of regional centres that would be destroyed if the tourism businesses were just left to wither, and people would move away and never come back.
If a business isnāt structurally non-viable, but is shut down or severely curtailed entirely because of the inability for tourists to enter the country, bridging that for a while is justifiable - especially planning right now where you can start to see the end of the pandemic coming as vaccination levels improve around the world.
Quick the rest of the state/territories better close the border to WA. Seems it only takes 1 case for WA to close their border to any state/territory, let alone two.
Quick the rest of the state/territories better close the border to WA. Seems it only takes 1 case for WA to close their border to any state/territory, let alone two.
Considering the likely result is potentially an Adelaide or Brisbane style lockdown, I donāt see why this wouldnāt be the case? I donāt think anyone in WA would expect special treatment from other states when it comes to border closures considering the widespread public support for the border regime as it has been in WA.
I think that should be expected, at least this time the federal govt canāt criticize or politicize it without being hypocrites. They did just close the border to NZ after one case.
so Iām guessing what Perth is doing, what Adelaide and Brisbane have done, will be the covid action plan for any of the UK and sa variants found in the community?
but what Iām getting at is if what is happening in Perth with the possible UK variant in escaping HQ and if this ever got out in Melbourne, then would Melbourne be doing the same thing and do a hard short lockdown??
