Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (COVID-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021. Listening to the speeches in this place today, it does feel like we live in two different worlds. On our side, people have been speaking about the pain and distress that our constituents are experiencing now, and yet I have heard so little of that from the other side. I don't know if it's that they don't know it, don't see it or just don't want to talk about it. It has been really stark. Listening to the member for Dobell and her plea that pharmacists get brought in—I'm looking forward to that rolling out, because we have very similar problems in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury to those that she describes on the Central Coast.

I absolutely support getting this bill through parliament. I support whatever financial assistance there's going to be to help people. But it is week 6 of the lockdown. In the last week, the conversations I've had with individuals and small businesses have been those of despair, because so many have not yet seen a cent of support come through to them. These are tough, resilient people. We've been through fires; we've been through floods; we've had the first lot of COVID. But this last wave has been more profound. I heard the Prime Minister say a couple of weeks ago, 'People have built up a buffer in the last six months.' I don't know where he has been talking to people. Perhaps that's big business, but for small businesses in my community in most sectors, particularly hospitality and anything involving tourism, there's no buffer. That buffer's gone, and this wave is really hurting. I've had people in tears.

It's not unusual for my office to have people describing their distress in emails, and phoning us and having conversations. They are literally in tears, partly because of the confusion about the payments and the lack of clarity in this system. They have to wait on the phone for hours and hours, particularly with Service NSW, to see if they meet the very strict eligibility criteria for the business stuff. They can't apply for the Commonwealth COVID disaster payment until they know for sure that they're not going to get the state one. These things don't work together; they work against each other.

As I was coming into the chamber, I had people messaging me, saying, 'I have just spent another four hours on the phone waiting' or 'I've just spent a couple of hours on the phone; they told me yesterday that I was eligible, but nothing has come through.' I really can't stress how profound this financial anxiety is that's been created, and the Prime Minister bears responsibility for it. I know he's tried to pass business off and say, 'That's for the states,' but, in the end, he's had to come on board and recognise that the states are not going to provide the sort of support that's needed. I'll talk about JobSaver in a moment.

When I'm talking about small businesses, I want to clarify that I'm not talking about businesses with a $50 million a year turnover. Some of them are microbusinesses. They're sole traders, partnerships and family businesses. They might be mums running businesses while parenting. They might be older workers who've chosen self-employment. They're tradies, creatives, people trying to turn their passion into a steady income. They are the people who are really struggling, and the system the government has chosen is fraught for them.

The first grants offered by the state were never going to be a targeted and appropriate response to the start of what everyone could see would be a long lockdown, and the JobSaver program falls short. It doesn't even keep the positives of JobKeeper, and it creates a whole lot of other gaps. What gets me is that they've had 18 months to get this system right. This is not just something that happened yesterday. This is something that we had an opportunity to respond to over a year ago and look at that response and say, 'How could we have done it better?' That's what a decent government would have done. That's what a competent government would have done. But it's not what this government has done. There was a whole lot of, 'Oh, great, we got through that; there's nothing to worry about now mate, she'll be right; let's all sit back and relax.' That complacency is causing enormous stress in the electorate of Macquarie.

What we're seeing is not a plan but something that's being done on the run. It's being announced at media conferences and sometimes updated within 24 hours to try and plug the gaps. Then we don't see any detail for weeks and weeks and weeks. Or, in the case of the legislation today, we've got legislation to make good what was an ad hoc announcement that the Prime Minister made around the disaster payment not being taxed, which is quite different to JobKeeper, and that's one of the things we obviously have to fix today. If you run a business the way this government has rolled out financial support, you'd be out of business; you wouldn't deserve to be in business. Sadly, the consequence of this could be that some businesses in my area go out of business. It will be a failure of this government if they don't survive through this COVID wave. They've been through fire, flood, COVID and another flood. I've just never seen people as strung out as they are now, and we're not in the harshest lockdown areas. Parents are supervising schooling at home. Teachers are teaching remotely but also planning to be back in the classroom. Seniors are isolated. They're losing those important incidental community contacts, like the chat you have when you go shopping, which they're told they're not allowed to have anymore. Construction workers had to suddenly secure their sites and abandon work. Builders tell me that a two-week shutdown is going to take weeks to recover from because of the time lag of materials, which were already in short supply and times pressured. They do an intricate job, and there are lots of moving parts. If you get one bit wrong, the rest falls apart. The small microbusinesses that don't meet the criteria might have been affected by bushfires and never been able to recover, or they might have grown significantly since 2019, so they don't look like they've suffered as much as they actually are. For tourism, people like the coach drivers and the family companies owning coaches and mini buses have been left abandoned anyway. This is another nail in the coffin, because the support is so confusing and that makes it really hard for people to plan their spending. In fact, that's having a flow-on consequence to restaurants and cafes. They have valiantly switched to takeaway. Some of the smaller ones are telling me they're quite busy, but many can see that there just isn't as much money in the community as there was last time we went through this, which is why the Prime Minister's comment that people have built up a buffer just does not ring true. Many of these businesses are paying extra overheads because they're repaying the extra on their deferred mortgage or loan from last time. They are really stretched.

The demand for emergency food is up and there's your evidence that people are doing it tough. Every single service I've spoken to tells me they're seeing people they've never seen before, who have never needed to reach out for help. Much of this is because of the Morrison government's failure to work with New South Wales to ensure that the support was there right from the starting, not week three or five, or, as we are now, week six.

This has also taken a huge personal toll. I have got the family trying to get a visa in a locked down city for a rising javelin star so she can take up her US college scholarship. I've got the apprentices under 17 who are missing out on any financial support. I've got the people who lost a job right before lockdown and they have seen not a single extra cent on the JobSeeker payment. I've got people like Chris who is a music teacher. He has lost hundreds of dollars in income but less than the minimum eight hours a week. He now has to find a way to pay his mortgage. I've got the mum who's worried about the mental health of her daughter, locked down on her own and working from home in the inner west. There is Rochelle, who is a wheelchair bound woman. She is a very strong woman but she requires special care. Without access to her usual hairdressing salon she can't have her hair washed. The advice she was given by the New South Wales government was that she could lie on the grass to do it. The parents and early childcare operators are each in a terrible position with the voluntary waiver of the gap fee, but there's not a cent of support for the centres to provide it. Then we've got flood victims whose repairs had to stop when they were so close to being able to go back home five months after the floods.

So much of this could have been avoided had the Prime Minister just done his job—in fact, his two jobs. We wouldn't be here if he had done the things he needed to, if he hadn't been complacent during summer, if he'd used the time to make good progress. We needed the dedicated, purpose-built quarantine facilities happening. The delay in doing this has literally cost lives and livelihoods. And he needed to get us enough vaccines and enough variety of vaccines to be able to vaccinate us—lots of us.

I will finish by talking about the reality of trying to get a vaccine in the Hawkesbury or the Blue Mountains. There is the most cumbersome and flawed booking system that's about as effective as the COVID app. It's no wonder a clever software developer has created a shortcut site to help people find appointments at the big vaccine hubs—although sadly it doesn't cover my electorate. Instead, people are sharing tips, and many are resorting to either waiting until September or October for an appointment, or travelling into the more intense hotspots if they can get an appointment to get to a hub. But we need our own hub. Constituents are reporting cancellations of appointments for Pfizer in order for the year 12 students in the real hotspots to be protected. They understand that, but they want to know when we going to be able to have it. People can't fathom why you can't get an AstraZeneca appointment when everyone is saying there is so much of it washing around. The bottom line is it's a mix of supply issue but also a workforce issue. Both councils have offered to set-up a hub but we still need the people.

The confusion of the proclamations by the Prime Minister—the Friday night, breathless announcements that either induce panic or are unintelligible don't engender confidence that we're going to see the things we need to see so that everyone can be vaccinated. It is hurting the mental health of my community and it's hurting people financially. We had an advantage. It was squandered by this government, by this Prime Minister. While we in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury recognise how lucky we are to be able to exercise in a World Heritage area, what we also know is that things are tough and they're tough for our neighbours. Of course, this is a time for us to be grateful. But, if ever there is a time for us to walk in someone else's shoes, now is the time. We think of those with very harsh lockdowns. We urge this government to do the right thing. Pull the finger out. Let's get this vaccination program rolling out properly.

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