NSW government’s demand for return of JobKeeper just idiotic
If the increasingly hysterical NSW government got its way the prime minister for Sydney would have to introduce a permanent JobKeeper.
Calls – increasingly, demands - from an increasingly hysterical NSW government for a “return to JobKeeper” are just plain embarrassingly idiotic.
There’s also a rather nasty undertone of: doesn’t the prime minister from Sydney know he must, he must, also behave as the prime minister for Sydney; something that started of course with the premier’s demand that vaccines be diverted from other states to Sydney.
Are both premier Gladys Berejiklian and her treasurer Dominic Perrottet so – how shall I put this? – so intellectually challenged that they don’t understand that they’ve already got a return to JobKeeper?
No, it’s not called JobKeeper – it’s now called the “COVID-19 Disaster Payment”. These days everything eventually evolves into a disaster, if not indeed the worst-ever disaster.
But it is in all practical – and better targeted and more effective - terms JobKeeper, albeit JobKeeper 2.2.
The first iteration of the “returned JK”, what I dubbed JK2.0, was a much meaner version that was doled out to another state, Victoria for its Lockdown 4.0.
But as it became clear that NSW was going to be in extended lockdown, JK became progressively more generous through versions JK2.1 and now JK2.2.
Further, has hysteria so taken over the duo’s brains that they’ve forgotten that not only do they have JK aka Cov-19 DisPay, but it is precisely the JK2.2 that they directly negotiated with PM Morrison and Treasurer Frydenberg?
This not only pays $600/$375 – the exact same payments at which level the original JK ended in March – to full and part-time workers locked down and locked out, but a new additional payment directly to employers up to (a claimed) 40 per cent of their payrolls for every lockdown week.
JobKeeper was devised, belatedly, in a panic-driven rush in March last year in the first scary days of the pandemic and the, in some ways, even scarier panicked reactions of governments to immediately rush to lockdowns.
I write belatedly because as I explained – and pleaded - at the time, New Zealand had shown us the way, but it took a week for Treasurer and Treasury to look across the Tasman.
Then they still got it wrong. NZ kicked off from the get-go with a two-tier payment for full and part timers. It also only locked the payments in for an initial 12 weeks, with a review and less generous extension.
We went clumsily with the $750 weekly payment for ALL workers, full and part time; and we locked in for 26 weeks.
Again as I’ve written, when the rest of Australia opened up after just a June quarter national lockdown, this meant the taxpayer was effectively paying the payrolls of tens of thousands of businesses and perhaps 1.5m workers outside Victoria unnecessarily.
I certainly do not want to see a replay of that, just in NSW now, and I’m sensing the treasurer who is not from NSW and acts as if he is treasurer for Australia doesn’t either.
Because if NSW premier and treasurer don’t understand they’ve got JK2.2 – which because of that direct payment to businesses in addition to the $600/$375 to stood-down workers, is more generous that where the original JobKeeper ended – what exactly extra do they want?
That the Federal Government will repeat (the mistake of) the original JK? That it will guarantee the payments to NSW workers and businesses for at least six months, irrespective of when this lockdown ends?
This goes to the broader and bigger point: the developing rhetoric from the NSW premier (and indeed the Victorian and SA premiers as well) that we’ll get more lockdowns even with greater vaccination levels.
It’s moved on from not a single Covid death being acceptable to now even a single infection.
If NSW got its way, that’s a recipe for a permanent JobKeeper.
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