Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I was simply making the point that those who are on jobseeker receive an equivalence in fiscal support because of the other programs that they have the ability to access. Those who are on JobKeeper do maintain that connection to their employment; that is the case. But what we are now interested in as a government is those who will be able to have that connection in six months from now, in 12 months from now and in two years from now. The reason we put JobKeeper into place all those months ago is that we did not want businesses to make decisions about the future of their employees when the issues were so uncertain.

This is a fast-moving crisis, and it's important that we remain agile to the changes in what we are seeing before us. JobKeeper has been doing its job. For part-time and full-time employees, it has been providing the exact support that we had designed for it to have. For equivalent casuals of 12 months or more, it has been doing the same thing. Those who haven't been able to access that program have been supported by jobseeker. These programs are in accordance with the Australian way of how we do things, where we don't provide some sort of a gradated level of income support based on what people's salaries used to be. The JobKeeper program was in a class of its own internationally, and it has been recognised as such.

Those opposite have sought to undermine JobKeeper despite supporting it from the day. They say they support it, and then they undermine it every day. Each-way Leader of the Opposition—everything he supports, he also opposes. He's for something and he's against something all at the same time. That's why they don't trust this Leader of the Opposition.

Dr Chalmers interjecting—

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