22 July 2021

Interview with David Koch, Sunrise, Channel 7

Note

Subjects: income support; lockdown; economic recovery

DAVID KOCH:

Treasurer, talk us through the support payments - who is eligible and how much can people get?

JOSH FRYDENBERG:

There are income support payments, Kochie, and there are business support payments. The income support payments are either $600 or $375 per week, based on the number of hours of work that you have lost. If you've lost between eight and 19 hours, you get the $375 payment. If you've lost 20 hours or more, you get the $600 payment. Services Australia have mobilised more than 14,000 staff to deliver these payments as quick as 40 minutes and more than half a million claims have already been progressed. That's a really impressive performance, and unlike JobKeeper, this money is going direct to the employee, to the worker, from Services Australia. With respect to business payments, they are kicking in now in New South Wales. You will get, as a business, between $1,500 a week or $10,000 a week if your turnover is between $75,000 and $50 million, which is about 98 per cent of all businesses. And, your turnover has fallen by 30 per cent or more due to these lockdowns. This equates to around 40 per cent of these businesses payroll, so it's not an insignificant amount of support and hopefully they can use that to stay on their feet, to meet their fixed costs like rent or their energy bills, or their other utility costs and, of course, they can help compensate staff as well.

DAVID KOCH:

Okay. Not as generous as JobKeeper, less people can apply for it. How big a hit will the economy take? These lockdowns are getting worse in South Australia, getting worse in Melbourne. Still ongoing. Getting worse in Sydney. Is there potential for this to put us into another recession?

JOSH FRYDENBERG:

We’ll probably expect that the September quarter is a negative, of course, let's wait and see what happens in the weeks ahead. To have your two biggest states, New South Wales and Victoria in lockdown is a big blow. Treasury estimates that having these three states with South Australia in lockdown, is costing around $300 million a day. Again, that is going to play out in many, many ways, but that's why our economic support is there. If you look at our economic performance, with respect to this whole recession that we faced, we have bounced back quickly. Faster, stronger than either Reserve Bank or Treasury had been expecting, so I'm confident that if we can get on top of this virus, we will see a strong bounce back in the economy.

DAVID KOCH:

For small business; are you going to loosen up employment laws again, so that business owners can stand down staff more easily?

JOSH FRYDENBERG:

Again, we are looking at all options to make it easier for small businesses to get through this pretty difficult patch.

DAVID KOCH:

You did this last time.

JOSH FRYDENBERG:

We did and we had a few battles, as you know, with the other side and I would hope that any changes would receive bipartisan report, because we've got one objective here, which is to preserve jobs, to preserve businesses and help Australians get through a really rough time. No country is doing this easy, Kochie. In the UK, you may see a full crowd at Wimbledon, but 130,000 people have died and just yesterday they had 50,000 new cases. We’re not out of this pandemic by any stretch. And that’s key, absolutely. 

DAVID KOCH:

So you will be looking at those stand down laws. Treasurer, thanks for joining us. 

JOSH FRYDENBERG:

My pleasure.