Terry McCrann: ScoMo’s Sydney handout is an insult to Melburnians

Victoria’s latest lockdown saw zero, zip, nada directly from Canberra. And if it had been extended, they certainly never gave the slightest indication help was on its way.

Oh dear, we do hope the prime minister isn’t favoring Sydney where resides his ‘favorite daughter’ premier and a federal election to be won or lost next year, over Victoria where Chairman Dan’s Labor has a seemingly unshakeable grip over too many state and federal seats.

When Victoria went into its lockdown in May, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg unveiled JobKeeper Version 2.0 at $500 a week for full-time workers and $325 for part-timers.

That compared with the $750 a week paid under JobKeeper 1.0 to both full and – far, far too generously – part time workers, when it started back in March last year.

JobKeeper 2.0 was supposed to apply to all workers in all states in any future lockdowns. But now, NSW workers are to get $600/$375 a week.

Further, back in May there was nothing, zero, zip, nada directly from Canberra (actually, to be more exact: from us, the taxpayers) to Victorian businesses forced into lockdown.

Then Frydenberg said two thing. Yes, the Federal Government would pick up the tab for supporting workers; state governments had to fund business support.

This was needed, he said, to stop state governments jumping into lockdowns too readily and sending the bill to Canberra. Yet now, the Feds are going 50-50 with the NSW state government in paying money directly to SMEs to fund 40 per cent of their payrolls.

Victorian SMEs can only ponder whether they’re on the wrong side of the Murray. Now true, both of these – the higher JobKeeper 2.1 payments and the direct funding of payrolls only kick in after three weeks of lockdown. The $500/$325 JobKeeper payments apply in the second and third week. On both sides of the Murray there’s nothing in the first week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison looks on as NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian speaks at a press conference in Sydney. Picture: Christian Gilles

Victoria never got to ‘the fourth week’. Its lockdown mostly ended after two, and then fully after three. So we never got to find out whether Frydenberg – and even more importantly his boss – would have gone to the ‘NSW package’ back then. But they certainly never gave the slightest indication that they might have. Now you might reasonably argue that more generous support is needed in the current state of play in NSW; and that the feds have ‘learned’ from being too stingy a month ago. That the NSW lockdown could be headed for weeks.

But that takes you into even more tricky territory.

Frydenberg was justifying being tough on Victoria on the basis of not wanting to reward bad behaviour – the ‘bad behaviour’ of a state government too quick to grab the lockdown lever.

But is he, and his Sydney-centric boss, now rewarding a different sort of bad behaviour – a state government that was too slow to grab the lockdown lever? It’s been argued that NSW should have ‘done a Vic’ – moved to a much tougher, more Sydney-wide lockdown sooner. That if it had done so, it might now have been following Victoria out of lockdown, progressively after two and then fully after three.

And if so, then, voila, the Feds wouldn’t have had to look as if they were favoring NSW and its state Liberal government, with more generous funding that kicks in – I presume, entirely coincidentally – after the three weeks at which the Victorian lockdown ended.

Of course, the new amended JobKeeper 2.1 will now also be available to Victoria – and any other state – if it follows NSW’s misfortune into extended lockdown. Maybe that’s a subtle way for PM and treasurer to ‘encourage’ Chairman Dan to be slow to any future lockdown. If it goes NSW-style pear-shaped, he’ll get more Canberra money.

A final very different point: we’re saying farewell to the ‘mo-man’ – Ian Silk - who steps down after 15 years as CEO of Australian Super, building it into the country’s biggest fund: mo-man, super-man of the century.