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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-08 Daily Xml
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JobSeeker Payment

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:33): My question is to the Premier. For those state government enterprise employees who lose their job as a result of the current circumstances, who are not eligible for JobKeeper allowance, will the Premier advocate to the national cabinet that those people should be able to get access to the JobKeeper payment? With your leave and that of the house, I am happy to explain.

Leave granted.

Mr MALINAUSKAS: I understand that the federal Treasurer has just explained to the commonwealth parliament that there is a provision within the proposed legislation around the JobKeeper payment that allows for changes to be made to accommodate circumstances that were not initially foreseen.

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:34): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. I think he is right. I think in the draft bill there was some discretion provided to the Treasurer in the order of $40 billion, which seemed to me to be an extraordinarily large sum of money, so he does have some discretion. That's certainly something I would be very happy to take up at the national cabinet.

As the leader would be aware, people in South Australia who do not qualify for the JobKeeper but have lost their job as a consequence of the coronavirus after 1 March this year do qualify for the JobSeeker payment. The JobSeeker is around double the previously named Newstart package, which I think also has had a change of name recently.

This is double the previously named Newstart package. It also had two other provisions which were announced by the federal government. The first of those was that there was, if you like, no asset threshold so that people of all different personal asset backgrounds could apply for that. Secondly, there was no 13-week delay in that money becoming available. There were two specific things as well as the doubling; that's the JobSeeker package. But back to the original question, yes, I am happy to work with my colleagues on the national cabinet to advocate for all and everything that we can get into South Australia to support our state through this particularly difficult period.

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