Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let me put on the record that at every step of the way the Labor Party has backed in JobKeeper. It was our and the union movement's idea, and we backed it in from day one. We gave the government all the license in the world. In fact, we backed laws in the parliament that gave the Treasurer extraordinary powers—wartime powers—to change the JobKeeper requirements as he saw fit. We'll get to that later.

At the end of 2020, 1.54 million Australia were still on JobKeeper. There is a recovery underway, but let's not forget 1.54 million Australians still need this payment. This includes 24,000 Tasmanians who still rely on the subsidy. They need this to keep the lights on, to put food on the table, to get the kids to school—life's essentials. The figures are better on the mainland, but in Tasmania a quarter of the jobs lost during COVID are yet to return, so JobKeeper is absolutely essential to my state. More than 45,000 Tasmanians remain unemployed or underemployed, and the recovery from the pandemic in my state is precarious. There's a budget update out today in Tasmania. Unemployment is forecast to be 6.75 per cent in 2022 and 5.5 per cent on the mainland.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:08 to 17:18

Before the suspension I was saying that Tasmania is still in a precarious employment position, with forecast unemployment of 6.75 per cent for 2022 and 5.5 per cent on the mainland; jobs growth in Tasmania projected to be 0.5 per cent in 2022 and 1.5 per cent on the mainland; and economic growth projected to be three per cent in 2022 and 3.5 per cent on the mainland. I give those figures to show that, in Tasmania, the jobs recovery is not as fast as on the mainland, which is why JobKeeper is so important to our state.

The unfortunate thing is that the government just doesn't seem to realise this. The government seems hell-bent on saying 'end of March; that's it'. We have Hobart City Mission in Tasmania preparing for a doubling of demand for emergency relief support. We have the TasCOSS CEO, Adrienne Picone, calling on the Tasmanian Liberal government to:

… go into bat for Tasmanians by advocating for the JobSeeker payment, which currently sits well below the poverty line, to be restored to a liveable, humane rate.

Of course she's saying that because with JobKeeper coming off, more people will go onto JobSeeker, which is unliveable now. The welfare people in Tasmania know there's a cliff coming. They can see the cliff coming.

Families and small businesses that are working hard to recover from the COVID-19-induced economic downturn are bracing themselves for the unplugging of the JobKeeper lifeline. Entire sectors, including tourism and hospitality, are now in crisis without government support. These sectors have not recovered. They are not recovering as fast as we would hope. We have lockdowns in Melbourne this week. The situation is fluid. And tourism and hospitality in Tasmania is not recovering as we would hope. Sadly, in the communities built around these sectors jobs have already been lost, and more will go. The tourism industry is crying out for support. Luke Martin, CEO of the Tourism Industry Council Tasmania, says: 'You can't just leave a whole bunch of businesses to fall off a cliff in March and not expect a lot of trauma. There has to be some form of support.'

It's not good enough and, in conclusion, I would like to turn my attention to the rorts side of this equation. Labor support JobKeeper, we always have. We gave extraordinary power to the Treasurer to fix issues. The government got the payments out quickly—terrific; we supported that. We gave the Treasurer the power to fix the problems as they emerged, and he chose not to exercise that power. When the issue emerged of highly profitable businesses giving their CEOs and their executives and their boards and their shareholders millions and millions of dollars in dividends and bonuses, he could have stepped in and fixed it like that. He chose not to. Yet this is the same government that will go to the ends of the earth to chase down $10 from a Centrelink recipient. It's not good enough. It's a double standard of gargantuan proportion. I fully support the member for Fenner in his call for an inquiry into this. Who got the money? If they didn't need it, they should be made to pay it back. The government can't sit on its hands and pretend this problem will go away. It's unfair. It's so demonstrably unfair to the millions of Australians who pay taxes in the belief that it's going to where the relief is needed and not to those who don't need it.

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