“There are a lot of Australians who are doing it tough,” Australia’s Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, member for Kooyong, told around 125 business representatives from across the nation, who attended the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (ACCI) zoom meeting on Thursday morning.

ACCI Chair and President Ray Sputore said, “We look to hear how we as businesses leaders can navigate the crucial shift from JobKeeper to no Jobkeeper and the economic recovery.”

It was a question only partially answered by the Treasurer, who moved to dispel fears that Australians will be worse off when JobKeeper comes to an end in March when the country is scheduled to exit recession following dreadful bushfires, ongoing drought and the arrival of the first Australian COVID-19 case in late January – instances which flung the country into a state of emergency.

“To give you a sense of how quick things were moving, I packed enough clothes to get to Canberra for four days, I ended up staying for 15 – in that process making the announcement on those three major packages (stimulus package, income/economic support, JobKeeper program),” he said, adding that initially a 20 per cent fall in the GDP was predicted for the June quarter with people “very fearful of unemployment reaching 10 per cent or more”.

The effective unemployment rate eventually hit a peak of 14.9 per cent with 1.3 million Australians losing their jobs or seeing their working hours reduced from a total of 600 million people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic around the world.

Confronted by the huge queues at Centrelink, the government set to work creating JobKeeper which has supported 3.6 million Australians. While putting it together, Treasurer Frydenberg called Australia’s former prime minister John Howard and asked him “how he thought such a program and announcement would be taken, the scale of it, the breadth of it.”

Mr Howard, Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister (1996-2007) and a former treasurer himself, gave the ‘green light’.

“He said, ‘Josh, in times of economic crisis, there are no ideological constraints’,” Treasurer Frydenberg said. “I think JobKeeper helped save the economy. As I go round the country still today, people stop me everywhere and say, ‘thank you for that economic lifeline’.”

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These days, 80 per cent of the 1.3 million who were rendered jobless in Australia have returned to the workforce (more than half of these women), and unemployment has been slashed by half though it still hovers at 10.5 per cent in Victoria.

As JobKeeper and JobSeeker taper off, Mr Frydenberg said, “Where we are focusing a lot of our attention now is in specific sectors.” For instance, travel agents hit hard by COVID-19, while the HomeBuilder program has been extended and has been given some flexibility.

“We’ll continue to look for opportunities to provide that continued economic support,” he said, including JobMaker hiring credit to give employers support to take on unemployed workers (450,000 jobs, and he encouraged ACCI members to take on people from 18-35 years and get up to $200 wage subsidy), investment incentives for businesses allowing them to buy, sell, install service and maintain assets and investments in infrastructure.

“There are a whole range of economic measures that the government has announced that will continue well into next year and the year after.”

Asked by ACCI CEO James Pearson about whether there will be meaningful tax reform while making reference to the Payroll Tax, Mr Frydenberg said, “Payroll tax is one of [the state government’s] taxes, and I think it’s a bad tax. It’s a tax on jobs,” he said.

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Australia and the rest of the world

To put things in perspective, Mr Frydenberg pointed to the Global Financial Crisis, when the global economy shrunk by 0.1 per cent, whereas this year the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is expecting the global economy to shrink by 4.4 per cent.  Throughout 2020, Australia’s annual GDP has fallen by 3.8 per cent, which Mr Frydenberg said is better than France, Germany, the UK, Japan, New Zealand and Canada. In the last September quarter, there was a huge boost in consumption and new data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have shown a 3.3 per cent increase in the September quarter.

“You never know what’s around the corner but we’re only one of nine countries to have kept our triple A credit rating,” he said.

Mr Frydenberg acknowledged “there’s been no harder year for Australia, particularly for businesses and their employees” and he also spoke of the “greatest economic shock since the great depression” but the “recovery is underway”.

“Our success on the health front has enabled the economic recover to get underway.”

He said that Australia is in “as good a position as any other nation in the world” pointing to half a million new coronavirus cases around the world just yesterday, “yet here in Australia, as you and I are speaking this morning, there’s not a single person on a ventilator or in ICU as a result of COVID-19”.

“We’re certainly not out of the woods yet,” he said. “While the trend is our friend when it comes to these economic indicators there is still a long way to go.”

“We are on the penultimate day of Parliament,” he said due to a heap of important legislation which is hoped to be passed this week such as laws to insolvency, world leading reforms to digital platforms, changes to responsible lending laws and many more.