Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia has made faster progress than anyone could have anticipated in March.
There have been over 7,100 confirmed cases in Australia, and 103 deaths. There are now less than 500 active cases in Australia, and over the past week, daily infection rates have remained low. Testing remains high, with more than 1.37 million tests undertaken in Australia.
“It is still too early to make a judgement what the health results of that are and it will be a week or two before we can see Australians move out of their homes, go back into work places and slowly go into playgrounds and schools are all these things they have been looking forward to doing for so long,” Mr Morrison said.
Mr Morrison also announced that public hospitals across the country will have record funding for the next five years after states and territories sign onto the government’s new health reform agreement. The goal of the funding agreement is to deliver more doctors, more nurses and more services across public hospitals in every state and territory.
READ MORE: JobSeeker, JobKeeper, and Australia’s PM Scott Morrison presents JobMaker plan
He also referred to job creation.
“The National Cabinet will be driven by a singular agenda, and that is to create jobs. It will have a job-making agenda,” Mr Morrison said.
“And the National Cabinet will drive the reform process between state and federal cooperation to drive jobs. It will drive a series of ministerial cabinet subcommittees, if you like, that will be working in each of the key areas, and in addition an initial list of areas and that will be further consulted on with the states. So in rural and regional Australia, on skills as I was talking to the National Press Club just this week on energy, housing, infrastructure, population migration and transportation and having a healthy workforce and a healthy community to support a strong economy.”
JobSeeker and JobKeeper are due to end in September, “but some sectors of the economy will need them for longer.”
He said the government is focused on creating jobs, particularly in rural and regional areas. “Whether it is a tradie or anyone else’s job, we want to make sure we can get our economy performing more strongly than it is now as soon as we can so we can create those jobs again,” he said.
It was also announced that the National Cabinet will continue to meet once a month beyond the COVID-19 crisis and will replace the Council of Australian Governments (Coag). The leaders, however, would only meet face to face twice a year.