Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I take great pleasure in joining the debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (COVID-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021. This bill builds on the federal government's support for the Australian business community in a time that has been absolutely unprecedented in our lifetimes.

Before I get to the finer details of the bill I'd like to reflect a little bit on the situation on the ground in communities like Gippsland. As you'd be well aware, before coronavirus became a household name large parts of regional Australia, including my electorate of Gippsland, had endured multiple years of drought, leading up to the black summer of bushfires. The black summer of bushfires caused incredible social, economic and environmental disruption and damage to my community. At their peak, the bushfires resulted in the evacuation of 60,000 people from the East Gippsland community, which obviously devastated the hospitality sector and the visitor economy in my region. To lose their guests during a peak period of visitation had a dramatic impact on their incomes. At that time, disaster payments were provided for people who had to evacuate. There was support for the business community and commitments to build back better to make sure that the infrastructure that had been damaged would be repaired and in fact built back to a higher, more-resilient standard. And I must say, that is still happening. It's ongoing. It's been painfully slow, but it is still happening.

Then, quite fortuitously for us, the recovery began. There was an enormous amount of goodwill within the community from people wanting to return to visit the bushfire-impacted regions. So, my hospitality sector, my accommodation providers, experienced an incredible surge in booking numbers—only to be hit by the COVID outbreak in Victoria. So, it's been a rollercoaster ride for the business sector: being open for business and taking huge surges in bookings and having a promised income flow, and then being closed down as lockdowns occurred in the state of Victoria on a longer and more-frequent basis than in many other parts of the nation.

So, it is with great empathy, sympathy and trepidation that the community looks on at our friends and family in New South Wales who are experiencing a very long lockdown right now. It does have a major toll on the economy as well as a toll on the social wellbeing of families, people of all ages. And even though a region like mine at many times during the last 18 to 20 months has had weeks and months with zero cases, that region is still impacted by association, if you like, whenever there's an outbreak in Melbourne and a lockdown is applied. For one, it restricts travel of people to our region, but also there is the potential for exposure sites when people who later test positive for COVID have visited those regional locations. We had that experience on several occasions. And I must say, the small business owners who have been exposed in that way and have had to shut their doors and have borne the reputational damage that goes with being an exposure site, have done incredibly good work in keeping their staff and their customers safe. Their business plans—their COVID plans around social distancing, around QR codes and around mask wearing, where appropriate—have ensured that we haven't had outbreaks in my community of Gippsland.

The federal government's response over the past 20 months has I think been commendable and, again, unprecedented: the JobKeeper arrangements, the support for the airline industry, the investment in economic stimulus packages for local government for regional development. All those initiatives have come at incredible cost to taxpayers, but they've been critical to ensuring that our economy has bounced back and has been more resilient than perhaps we ever would have expected.

But, in particular for the hospitality and visitor economy—the tourism sector—it has come at an enormous cost as well. The loss of confidence among people to want to make bookings and the loss of confidence among business owners to invest in their properties—to commit to future capital upgrades and infrastructure improvements—has really had an impact on the sector. I do fear that, despite our best initiatives and despite the initiatives included in the legislation before the House today, we will lose some of those businesses, who just won't be able to cope with all of these lockdowns, with not only the roller-coaster of emotions but also the roller-coaster of income going up and down. They won't be able to trade their way through it.

The government response in terms of income support during the lockdowns, I think, has been extraordinary. When a lockdown occurs, we see Australians who, obviously, face many immediate questions about their income, about what the weeks ahead look like for them and about how they navigate their pathway back to normal life. But, for Australians who are facing lockdowns, we have been working to deliver financial support to individuals and businesses through Services Australia. I want to commend the minister, the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and everyone involved in the ERC for working quickly through some of these challenges.

We are seeking to share the costs with the state governments in delivering that much-needed support to small and medium-sized businesses. Keep in mind, in a community like mine, the typical business is a small or medium-sized business. It's a family owned enterprise. It's mum and dad and half a dozen or a dozen staff at best. The more dominant business in those communities is the small enterprise, so making sure that we work with the state governments to share the costs of this much-needed support for small and medium-sized businesses is critical.

We know that people who have lost more than 20 hours of work in the previous week can claim $750 and that people who have lost between eight hours—a full day's work—and 20 hours can claim $450. That's the same level of support that we provided with JobKeeper last year. This is intended, obviously, to keep some cash flowing through the households, but it's also an incredibly important part of how we support the business community. Households with cash coming through them are in a position to support their local businesses. But, as much the government has a role to play in supporting the business sector, and I do commend the legislation before the House today, we as individuals also have our role to play.

In my community, we have a promotion which we call Putting Locals First, and we need to keep putting locals first. It's about supporting those local tradies. It's about recognising that, if you can go into a local shop and purchase the item you need from the local shopkeeper, that money will flow through your community. It's about going to a local hairdresser, hiring a local tradie or eating at a local restaurant whenever you can, because it multiplies out through the community. It gives that business confidence to hire another apprentice or another trainee. It gives them the capacity, when sporting clubs and community groups walk in seeking sponsorship, to invest back into their community. So, by putting locals first as individuals and making those individual decisions, particularly in times like those of the bushfires or the coronavirus, we can all have an impact with our own salaries in supporting our local communities.

One of the things that I've done in my role as a local member—and I'm sure, Deputy Speaker Vasta, if you get the chance to visit my community, you will happily embrace this particular challenge—is the Great Gippsland Pub Challenge. This year I've made a New Year's resolution I'm sure to keep, which is to visit every pub in my electorate and have a meal there to support the hospitality sector. There are 52 pubs in Gippsland; I've got through about 30 now. I'm still in the same sized T-shirt, but I'm not going to guarantee that by the end of the year! The idea is to challenge my constituents to visit pubs, because they're hospitality venues, and support those local jobs as well, and in return they'll get a '100 per cent Authentic Gippslander' T-shirt. If you're ever in my electorate, Deputy Speaker, I'm sure you'd be welcome to join me for a parmie or a steak at one of the fine establishments across Gippsland. So it is a partnership. It's a partnership with the community, but it's also a partnership with the states. We need to keep supporting these business owners to help them get through what has been a very difficult period.

We've got to be honest, though. We've got to be honest with the Australian people and have this conversation: governments, in this difficult time, are not going to get every decision right. Our federal government has endeavoured at all times to take the advice of the experts and health authorities, to make decisions to keep Australians safe and to protect lives and livelihoods, but we have to acknowledge that we're not always going to get every decision right, just as some of the state premiers haven't got everything right on every occasion. But we have done better than almost every country in the world, and, as Australians, we should be proud of that. We should be proud of the fact that we've been able to get ourselves to this position, where we have saved lives, suppressed the virus and started the recovery process, even if it has been a bit of a roller-coaster in recent months. What we all have to do is keep following the public health advice, maintain social distancing as required to be COVID safe and, if you haven't already done so, make an appointment to get vaccinated.

In relation to the legislation before the House today, it does continue the government's commitment to respond but also lead the recovery process. Under the Treasury Laws Amendment (COVID-19 Economic Response No.2) Bill there are five schedules. Schedule 1 has amendments relating to the COVID-19 economic response payments. That schedule to the bill amends the payments of benefits act to allow the Treasury to make rules for economic response payments to provide support to an entity where they've been adversely affected by a restriction imposed by a state or territory to control COVID-19. Schedule 2 relates to the disclosure of tax information to Australian government agencies to facilitate those COVID-19 business support programs. Schedule 3 allows for the tax-free treatment of payments from COVID-19 business support programs. This schedule introduces a new legislative instrument, making a power in the income tax laws to make eligible Commonwealth COVID-19 business grants free from income tax. It makes sure that the benefits that are being distributed have the greatest impact for the business owners themselves. Schedule 4 is a modification power. This measure will reinstate a power that allows responsible ministers to change arrangements for complying with information and documentary requirements under Commonwealth legislation in response to ongoing challenges posed by the pandemic. Schedule 5 includes the tax exemptions for COVID-19 disaster payments. They are a good range of measures that, as I said, continue the government's commitment to not only respond to the challenges of the pandemic but also help lead the recovery and ensure that Australians can get back to work and back to supporting their families and contributing to the productivity of our nation, which is so critical to our future growth prospects.

Finally, in the moments I have left, I think it's important that we count our blessings and be a bit thankful as a nation. We should be thankful for the frontline health workers who have been out there every day during this pandemic. They have been out there every day, undertaking the testing, responding to people's health needs when they become unwell and ensuring that Australia's world-class health system is there for Australians and doesn't become overwhelmed. To our health workers, our nurses, our doctors and the people in the clinics, administering the vaccines or coordinating the program: thank you for the work you've done. Thank you to the shop workers, the people at the front line in those essential businesses. Even when we've had outbreaks in Sydney and Melbourne, where the biggest outbreaks have occurred, they've still been going to work every day, fronting the public and potentially exposing themselves to some level of risk. The transport operators and the truck drivers have been through an incredibly difficult year as well, often facing border restrictions, which to them—and, I must confess, to me as well—must have seemed pretty stupid at the time, being stuck on the side of the road for hours, waiting for testing to occur, when they wanted to continue delivering their loads and supplies around the nation. To people like that, to the medical professionals, to the retail workers, to the truck drivers, to the emergency services personnel, to our police, to our ambulance and fire authorities, to everyone who has been called on to play a role during the COVID pandemic: thank you for the work you've done.

Of course, the Australian Defence Force has been called on enormously over the last couple of years. At the outset, I mentioned the bushfires in Gippsland. At the same time, they've been called out to respond to floods and storms and have then undertaken duties in their humanitarian aid and disaster relief capacities, both at home and abroad. Their capacity to respond when required, when the circumstances become too difficult for state authorities, is a capability we should be enormously proud of as a nation, and I thank them for their service.

But the pathway out of this, the pathway for us as a nation, is the vaccine program. The Prime Minister has outlined his national plan in great detail, and I have every confidence in his capacity to deliver that with the support of his cabinet colleagues. Our challenge is to keep building hope, confidence and optimism amongst the Australian people and amongst the business community and to make sure that Australians know that their government has their back and that the government is working to overcome the challenges that they face. Without particularly seeking to single out any individuals, I do caution the House more generally that we mustn't talk Australia down at this difficult time. We mustn't be too negative, notwithstanding the challenges of identifying any flaws in the systems that have been put in place. Let's not talk Australia down. Let's keep working together as best we possibly can.

The other point I'd make is that COVID cannot be an excuse to not get things done on the ground. COVID shouldn't be an excuse for things not being rolled out in a timely way when we make commitments for infrastructure and community activities. We have been able to deliver 12 million vaccine doses under the program, so it's rolling out. We have got an incredible range of economic stimulus packages available for local governments and state governments. We need to roll them out. We need to get stuff done on the ground. As a local MP, as the member for Gippsland, my absolute commitment is to keep putting locals first and making sure we're all working together, making good decisions and delivering a safer, stronger and fairer community. I thank the House.

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