Cairns Adventure Group director Roderic Rees said local tourism operators who had been “haemorrhaging” money for months through lost business were now preparing for inevitable job losses when the Morrison government’s JobKeeper scheme is switched off on Sunday.

With an estimated 50,000 job losses predicted for the tourism sector in Queensland alone, tourism businesses in destinations such as Cairns, which were reliant on international visitors, face the prospect of losing skilled staff.