Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Warringah for this motion and I want to acknowledge the member for Kingsford Smith, when he said that it showed the priorities of those opposite in the way that they handled this pandemic response, the economic response, particularly when it comes to JobKeeper. It's good example to use, where some companies, including foreign-owned ones, didn't need JobKeeper but got heaps of it whilst Australian small businesses went to the wall.

It's no secret that I think those economic supports were lifted too quickly by the federal government, and I spoke many times in this place saying exactly that. The vaccine hadn't rolled out yet and there wasn't enough dedicated quarantine around the country. It was much too early. And when those opposite cut JobKeeper back in March, I was also calling for targeted industry-specific support because we knew that the lockdowns would keep coming and that our community would continue to be affected for a long time to come. We also knew that those lockdowns would keep rolling, because those opposite totally failed to develop a national quarantine framework, as I said—with the exception of Howard Springs, a fantastic facility in the Top End. Well done to all those who've been working there. I had a two-week stay out there myself and they do an excellent job—but we needed more of that. We know that hotels are no good at containing a highly transmissible virus. Even now that we've been able to reach higher vaccination rates and there is some opening of the borders, we're faced with potentially a new variant and we're hoping that our hospitals won't be overwhelmed as people begin to move. But we know that industries continue to need our support, so it's a great initiative by the member for Warringah to bring forward this motion.

It's important to note that a number of sectors have copped huge losses and they'll take a while to get back on their feet—that's the reality of it. We saw this in my electorate, in Darwin and Palmerston, in the business events sector. They lost about $30 billion worth of revenue for events that were cancelled in 2020. One example in Darwin is that we were going to host the Developing Northern Australia Conference in August. Everything was ready to go, but the Territory went into a snap lockdown. I was trapped in the ACT lockdown at the time. I really want to commend the organisers of the Developing Northern Australia Conference because, with virtually no notice, they moved it almost totally online and hosted a virtual conference. They did a great job, but there's no denying there was a massive loss of revenue to our local hotels, our hospitality sector and local tourism operators, and so many, many Territorians and their businesses suffered as a result. That's just one event in the past almost two years that we've been battling this pandemic.

The Territory's tourism sector has suffered the worst. It's very seasonal, as honourable members would know, the dry season being the time when a lot of tourism businesses make the majority of their income. But who was locked out? Sydney and Melbourne markets, due to lockdowns. Why? Because hotel quarantine leaked. Why? Because they because there were no dedicated quarantine facilities in those places. For many of our tour operators, their ability to retain their workforces was greatly hindered. The dry season is when the majority of the workers come to the Territory, but, if they can't retain the workers over the wet, it becomes very difficult. How do you keep a business afloat and people employed in the face of such uncertainty? Our national arts sector has been completely smashed, largely unable to tour or to stage shows and having to deal with cancellations. Their workforce was mostly left out of JobKeeper support, so it's been devastating for that sector. The arts got many Australians through the long and dreary months of lockdown, so the least the federal government could do is to acknowledge workers in the arts sector and include them in support schemes. Tourism and the arts sector were very hard hit, and I don't have time to speak about the universities. But Charles Darwin University, through a lack of support, has also done it very hard. The federal government needs to do better.

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