Adam Bandt: almost a million Casual workers left behind
The government’s wage subsidy leaves nearly one million casual workers stranded with no way to make ends meet.
The Greens have a plan to make this stimulus package fair for everyone:
✅ greens.org.au/covid19/workers
We’re fighting to extend the wage subsidy to include casual workers who’ve been employed for less than 12 months and people on temporary work visas.
We want to make sure that no one gets left behind ✊
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Source & Transcript 📼
SKY News, On the Hour, 11am 2/04/2020
Host: Tom Connell, Guest: Adam Bandt
ADAM: Now parliament is about to resume to do what we argued for last week. I’m very pleased that the government has listened to the calls for wage and job guarantees, but as with most of their announcements they’re leaving people behind.
Up to a million casuals who’ve been employed for less than 12 months won’t be able to get the support here and that’s not only going to be bad for those workers. It’s going to be bad for a lot of those businesses that are reliant on engaging seasonal workers. Festivals for example, where you run from year to year all of those people now are being left out of this package and we hope to be able to fix it.
TOM: Isn’t that pretty — I mean it gets tricky, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. As you said, a lot of things you’re calling for from the government came strings attached, this money. It’s basically going only to workers.
When you talk seasonal I get what you’re saying it’s not, you know, a great outcome for these people but if someone worked at a festival last year and they were maybe going to work this year, isn’t it pretty hard to say they’re going to get a paycheck for a festival that’s never going to go ahead? What exactly are you suggesting?
ADAM: No, because there’s big sectors of industry that are doing it tough like hospitality, retail and tourism. Now a lot of their work is – you have peaks and troughs throughout the course of the year and you can plan a year in advance, or six months in advance, when the next and peak is going to be.
So there’s a lot of people who would have been gearing up for big tourism or arts related events that were coming up, that have been planned and been well the calendar and employers would have been about to put people on and they wouldn’t necessarily have had them on the books for a year. So a lot of people who are planning towards that, are now going to find themselves without income.
But just more generally – what about startup businesses for example?
TOM: It’s not without income at all though. You mentioned the doubling of the Newstart payment, so that’s actually not that far short of this $1500.
It’s important to stress here for people that could access this payment it’s – they’re not going to be left without a payment, in fact if you take in the tax from Newstart, it’s only a couple hundred dollars different.
ADAM: Well, some of them might be covered depending on whether they meet some of the other tests like partner income, and so on, it depends what the government ultimately does with that.
But there’s a basic principle here of — why is this 12 month rule in place in the first place?
Now if you’ve got a startup business, for example, that’s been going for several months, why are they being excluded? If you’ve got someone who’s been employed 6 months on a regular basis, they’ve got rent to pay, they might have other obligations as well, why aren’t they being included? It doesn’t make any logical sense to exclude these people.
We’re talking about close to a million people – 950-odd-thousand people who are going to be excluded. Those people have financial obligations, they have rent to pay, they have food to buy, and all of a sudden they’re being left out. The government hasn’t put forward any justification for it.
There is no justification for it. Jobs and wages guarantees are a good idea but they should apply to everyone. Also they should apply to temporary work visa holders as well.
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