Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I absolutely reject the premise of Senator Farrell's question. There are a number of other new measures in the support package which I hadn't previously had an opportunity to speak to, including the expansion of the SME loan guarantee scheme, as part of our commitment to support up to $40 billion in lending to small and medium enterprises—precisely the sorts of businesses that Senator Farrell was referring to, I presume. Under the existing scheme, over 35,000 loans, worth more than $3 billion, have already been provided. These are helping thousands of businesses get to the other side of this pandemic. What the SME Recovery Loan Scheme will benefit from is an increased government guarantee. This will increase from the current 50-50 split between the governments and the banks to an 80-20 split.

We also see support provided through the new international aviation support helping Australia's international passenger airlines to maintain more than 8,000 core international aviation jobs, support for regular passenger airports to meet their domestic security screening costs— (Time expired)