Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question and for her great support and advocacy, particularly for small- and medium-sized businesses. The JobKeeper changes that we made earlier this year provide critical IR flexibilities to businesses, and 95 per cent of the businesses who had the benefit of those flexibilities on JobKeeper were small- and medium-sized businesses. There have been an enormous number of businesses contact the government and describe how critical those flexibilities were and are. One of them was an Australian owned tourist coach business which had been operating, pre COVID, since 1926. They said: 'The flexibility arrangements allowed our company to reduce hours of work to in part meet the drop in company revenue. Without these flexibilities we would have reduced staff numbers and/or possibly shut down altogether.'

The government is very clear in its position. We think that those flexibilities should be extended to those businesses that were in extreme distress but are still in very significant distress. The position of members opposite about this legacy group of businesses, as we have described them, is very clear. The member for Watson said, 'We don't agree with that.' And the reason they don't agree with that, notwithstanding that these flexibilities are business- and job-saving lifelines for many businesses in Australia, is that, as the member for Watson has argued, the position of members opposite is that the flexibilities could allow someone on a minimum wage to be worse-off. The first problem with that argument is it ignores that the very real-world alternative is that that person doesn't have a job because the business fails. That's what it fundamentally ignores.

And there are other problems. The figures that were used by the member for Watson do not take into account the fact that these can be used in conjunction with JobSeeker—the wage—and we are increasing the income-free area from $106 to $300, which seriously mitigates any form of loss. Another problem is it ignores the fact that there are built-in protections.

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