JobMaker will kill full-time jobs and wages
at 12:10 am on February 23, 2021 | 6 comments
When the Morrison Government announced its $ billion JobMaker wage subsidy in the October Federal Budget, we cheekily labelled it “JobTaker” because we believed it would incentivise employers to replace full-time workers with insecure part-time workers.
The logic supporting this claim was simple. JobMaker gives businesses $200 a week for each additional employee they hire aged 16 to 29 and $100 per week for people aged 30 to 35.
Therefore, businesses could gain financially if they cut existing employee hours and instead hired a bunch of people aged under 30 or 35 on 20 hours per week. This way, businesses could receive subsidies, reduce their out-of-pocket wage costs and earn fatter profits, all courtesy of the Australian taxpayer. And they could do all this without actually lifting overall employee hours above what would occur anyway as the economy continues to recover.
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Yesterday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released
Overseas Arrivals and Departures data for December, which confirmed that net migration into Australia has swung sharply negative.
Australia has lost nearly 19,000 net permanent & long-term arrivals since the pandemic hit in March 2020 – the first time net arrivals have been negative since the data series began in 1976:
Accordingly, annual net arrivals plummeted to only 96,700 in the 2020 calendar year, the lowest level since 1999:
As shown in the next chart, there is a strong correlation between the ABS’ monthly net permanent & long-term arrivals data and the official quarterly net overseas migration (NOM) data, which is only current to June 2020:
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While the number of people infected in the Pacific has been incredibly low, almost everyone has been affected – not surprisingly, as most Pacific island economies are so dependent on tourism. The widespread distribution of a vaccine in the region is, therefore, critical to reopen economies, rebuild livelihoods and protect the development gains we have achieved together over the last two decades.
Pacific island nations are a global success story in preventing COVID-19 from reaching their shores. Strict border closures have kept the islands largely free of the virus, almost a year after the pandemic began spreading across the globe. While lockdowns have been critical to safeguard public health and protect vulnerable health systems, the economic cost has been massive.
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