Terry McCrann: Why Andrews’ rescue package can’t stem blood flow
The government’s $3 billion so-called “Business Survival and Adaptation Package” was the absolute bare minimum that could be done to keep alive the businesses and jobs our incompetent Premier has destroyed. To call it a Band-Aid solution would be generous, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Bluntly, brutally, the Premier after first ordering you to saw off a leg is now handing out Band-Aids to put over the stump.
The $3bn so-called “Business Survival and Adaptation Package” was the absolute bare minimum that the government could possibly have done to try to — just — keep alive the businesses, jobs and lives that this Premier has ordered be destroyed.
It is also another “big lie” to sit alongside our Premier’s mother of all porkies that “this virus does not discriminate”.
It has certainly “discriminated” against the state with the most incompetent government in Australia led by the most incompetent and dictatorial premier.
The single biggest element in — and more than half of — the $3bn is $1.7bn of deferred payroll tax for smaller businesses.
They will still have to pay it in the 2020-21 year — if, of course, they are still around.
It is certainly a kick in the teeth. If you do struggle through this financial year, just when you are attempting to put your business and your life back together you get slugged with a double tax bill.
Take that “fake” assistance out of the package and the Premier and his Treasurer, Tim Pallas, are offering barely a billion dollars, spread across all the small and medium-sized businesses employing more than two million Victorians.
Maybe even describing it as a Band-Aid is being generous.
This Andrews Government has deliberately embarked on keeping not only Victoria but the entire nation in the worst recession we’ve had in nearly 100 years.
The national economy shrank by an unprecedented 7 per cent in the June quarter.
Well over two million Australians lost their jobs.
The national economy was coming back to life in the September quarter and seven of the eight states and territories did come back to some extent.
One did not and, as a quarter of the national economy, limited the recovery in the other states and territories as well. It was due first to the criminal negligence of the quarantine debacle.
Then we had an incompetent Premier and an incompetent government setting out to destroy the state economy to “rectify” that negligence.
If he had the slightest, tiniest sense of self-awareness — of his own self-delusional megalomania — he would have resigned and handed the mess to someone else to try to fix.
Terry McCrann is the Herald Sun’s senior business commentator
Originally published as Terry McCrann: Why Andrews’ rescue package can’t stem blood flow