Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Defence Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] My question is to the Prime Minister. At JBS meatworks in Dinmore, Queensland, more than 1,700 full-time workers are at risk of permanently losing their jobs because the Prime Minister has excluded them from JobKeeper. There are already one million Australians who are unemployed. Why is the Prime Minister adding these workers to the unemployment queue in the middle of the worst recession in almost a century?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When JobKeeper was introduced, there were rules that were established to ensure that it was a targeted program, that it focused on, particularly, smaller and medium-sized businesses. For large businesses with turnovers over $1 billion, it is available to those businesses where they have suffered a fall in their turnover of over 50 per cent, and for other businesses—smaller businesses and medium-sized businesses—of more than 30 per cent. That support, through JobKeeper, has been supporting almost a million businesses across the country and some 3.6 million employees across the country.

But JobKeeper was not the only support that the government introduced. In fact, our first response was to ensure that we strengthened the JobSeeker support for those who would become unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the COVID-19 recession that we knew would result from the global pandemic and the global economic impacts. So we put those in place, and today it is still the case that JobSeeker is there, in an elevated format, in a way that will provide support to Australians who find themselves out of employment. What I also know is that, were it not for the interventions undertaken by the government, some 700,000 additional Australians—as we are advised by Treasury—would have also found themselves unemployed.

These very large businesses, of more than $1 billion in turnover or approaching that, if they have not had the blow of the COVID pandemic in the way that others more seriously have, then those companies of course are going to reach into their own resources to provide support to their employees, and many have. Although Qantas have had significant support through JobKeeper—they are one of the most significant beneficiaries of JobKeeper—at the same time they have gone to the markets, they have raised capital and they have sought to keep as many people on as possible. And they have had one of the most significant blows.

For those who find themselves without employment, JobSeeker is there, and they can earn up to now $300 a fortnight without that impacting their JobSeeker supports. I see the member for Blair throw his hands apart because he believes that JobSeeker is something less than JobKeeper. I don't have that view. I know that JobKeeper and JobSeeker in the next phase will combine together to give the supports that Australians need. We will ensure that the economic— (Time expired)