Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The National Retail Association wants all businesses to have greater flexibility, not just those receiving jobkeeper
Australia’s retailers are calling on the Morrison government to broaden the power of employers to cut workers’ hours and change duties, as Labor signalled it will oppose the move to extend flexibility linked to the jobkeeper wage subsidy.
The National Retail Association chief executive, Dominique Lamb, told Guardian Australia the government should consider granting all businesses the flexibility to vary work hours – not just the firms in receipt of the jobkeeper wage subsidy.
The Morrison government will reduce the level of income support paid out under the jobkeeper and jobseeker payments from 28 September, and create two payment tiers for the wage subsidy to ensure the rate aligns more closely with people’s pre-Covid income, rather than giving part-timers and casuals a pay rise.
The overhaul will be unveiled by Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg on Tuesday ahead of an economic statement the government will deliver on Thursday. As well as lowering the rate of both the jobkeeper wage subsidy and the $550 coronavirus supplement in jobseeker after September, the government will tighten the eligibility requirements for both payments – including retesting businesses in October.
Pop-up testing facility to be set up in Sydney hotel car park as Victorian premier says 37,588 tests were conducted in the state yesterday. Follow live news and updates
Victoria is preparing two-million reusable masks for people in Melbourne and Mitchell Shire by the end of July, and a million single-use masks, but in case you want to go and make your own now, you can find a CDC guide on how to make one here.
The Victorian government is going to prepare its own how-to guide for masks in the coming days.
Due to the heightened public health risk with the current outbreak in Victoria, we are asking ALL South Australians with symptoms (fever/chills, cough, sore throat, runny nose, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell) to get tested for COVID-19. https://t.co/daEpRqXyQVpic.twitter.com/lccT3Rvwef
The UK needs to maintain “constant vigilance” as it eases out of lockdown, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned.
When outbreaks occur they typically occur in clusters and we’re seeing certain work environments, for example, food processing factories, as being fairly common places for those clusters to rise.
The common denominator is really being indoors, being crowded, being there for prolonged periods of time, noisy environments where people are coughing and shouting, and so there’s more droplet transmission.
The total number of people to die from Covid-19 in Russia has increased by 104 to 9,073, according to the country’s coronavirus response centre.
Russia on Sunday also reported 6,791 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 634,437.
The Australian government insists it is focused on the next phase of “short-term measures” to support people through the coronavirus pandemic amid reports it is considering a permanent $75 per week lift in unemployment benefits.
The government has been coming under increasing pressure over the drop-off in economic supports due in September, with the Qantas announcement last week of a further 6,000 job cuts adding to expectations of extended economic pain.
Opposition says inquiry could investigate scheme’s human cost, including reports some victims took their own life
Labor has called for a royal commission into the robodebt program, heaping pressure on the Coalition to accept some form of independent inquiry into the unlawful scheme that some families claim led victims to take their own lives.
In a statement issued on Tuesday the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, and frontbenchers Bill Shorten and Mark Dreyfus argued a royal commission was needed to probe the creation and administration of the debt recovery scheme, which saw Centrelink send at least 470,000 unlawful demands for money over four years.
“Before Covid, my three children and I had structure. We would wake up in the morning, they would go to school and do their thing, and I would do mine. We had joy,” says Vicky (not her real name), a single parent living in one of the most disadvantaged boroughs in the country, in south London.
The capital has the highest rate of child poverty in any English region – more than 700,000 children, and 43% of children in inner London. Over the past five years, child poverty has risen in every London borough, in part because of the capital’s uniquely high housing, childcare and living costs, as well as low pay (72% of children in poverty are in working households) and the impact of £39bn cut nationally from the benefit system since 2010. Then, in March, came Covid-19 and lockdown, deepening and accelerating deprivation across the UK, increasing rates of child abuse, mental ill-health and domestic violence.
Class action lawyers raise prospect of misfeasance claim against ministers
The robodebt debacle’s financial cost looks set to grow after a judge suggested it was likely the federal government would have to pay interest on unlawful debts issued to hundreds of thousands welfare recipients over nearly five years.
And in an escalation of the class action brought by Gordon Legal, lawyers for the firm raised the prospect of a misfeasance in public office claim that could force ministers to front court over the saga.
Mutual obligations for welfare recipients return today.
There are now about 1.6m people receiving the unemployment benefit jobseeker.
Mutual obligations return today & will be gradually phased in.
We are in Phase 1 meaning there are no financial penalties for not meeting activity requirements.
We don't have a timeline of each "phase" but I will keep following up with the Minister for more clarity.
The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian was giving a press conference just now. She was pressed on comments from her police minister, David Elliott, who said yesterday that police would not approve future permit protests that did not comply for the health guidelines.
Michaelia Cash says there will be a three-phase restart of welfare requirements
The federal government has announced a “limited capacity” return to mutual obligation requirements for Australia’s welfare recipients from next week.
The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, announced mid-May that mutual obligations for jobseekers, which had been put on pause at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, would be further suspended until 1 June, after which a three-phase reintroduction would commence.
Penny Wong says treasurer should have ‘the courage’ to take responsibility for error as Coalition faces calls to expand wage subsidy
Labor will attempt to pressure the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, to appear before the Senate’s Covid-19 inquiry to explain the “$60bn black hole” in the jobkeeper program.
The move comes as the Morrison government faces growing calls to expand the wage subsidy to cover a wider group of workers, after revelations on Friday that the six-month program is now expected to cost the budget $70bn rather than $130bn.
Scott Morrison has said of the pandemic, ‘we’re all in this together’ but his government has excluded more than 1 million people from assistance. Laura Murphy-Oates talks to some of those people and Ben Doherty analyses the government’s response.
The Australian government has passed legislation for a $1,500 per fortnight wage subsidy for eligible employers amid the coronavirus. Check your eligibility, how much you’ll get, when it will be paid and how it works with the jobseeker payments
Victoria and Queensland register deaths as Western Australia flags border closure and federal government acts on childcare and industrial relations concerns. Follow live updates
The PM stresses that the “health advice we have is that there is no health reasons why children can’t go to school”.
Asked if taxes will increase to pay for its massive stimulus funding, Morrison does not address this directly.
Obviously there will be a heightened debt burden as a result of decisions we have had to take. They have been necessary decisions. Otherwise the calamity for Australian households economic will be disastrous. We have taken that decisions of government to step up and to make this commitment to provide people with an economic lifeline over the many months ahead. But you are right, we will have to then work hard on the other side to restore the economy. Now, that’s why we are being so careful not to have things that tie the economy and the budget down off into the future. We do need to snap back to the normal arrangements on the other side of this.
Morrison says schools have been planning for a “balance – a combination of distance learning” and, for those who can’t “provide a learning environment at home, for the children to be able to return to school”.
School will return after the holidays. They just won’t be holidays that most school students have known for a long time. And when they go back, it’s the learning that matters, and we hope to have an arrangement that can return as much to normal as possible.
But we have to accept that there will be, for some protracted period of time, this combination of distance learning, and for those who can’t do that at home, no child should be turned away.
In a deeply ingrained reflex, Australians have looked to government in this crisis. Will it prove its worth?
We are all off balance. From the moment I open my eyes in the morning, I feel the discomfiting sensation of being suspended between the set of propositions that existed before the pandemic and the set of propositions that exist now.
I suspect everybody is encountering this out of kilter sensation frequently in normal life. Thousands and thousands of Australians were employed last week but aren’t today. Businesses have gone bust, or teeter on the brink. Kids are not at school. Socialising is curtailed. Unless you are young and sanguine enough to believe coronavirus is either a beat-up or a “boomer remover” and therefore it’s business as usual, you are either ill or deeply anxious about getting ill and infecting others.
From fanning national anxiety with claims of a cyber-attack on MyGov, to a lack of empathy for the jobless, the government services minister has no grasp of the gravity of our times
“It was heartbreaking stuff yesterday Alan.”
“Alan”, naturally, is Alan Jones and our heartbreak town crier is Stuart Robert – the minister charged with rolling out government support to Australians knocked sideways courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic.
Jobseekers can now request appointments be carried out over the phone or online, while Centrelink debt recovery continues despite Covid-19
Welfare recipients will have their mutual obligations relaxed during the coronavirus crisis, but the government has stopped short of heeding calls from Labor, the Greens and social service groups to suspend them entirely.
Facing growing pressure to ease the burden amid a looming economic downturn and increasingly strict social-distancing guidelines, the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said on Friday the government had adopted a range of measures aimed at making the system more flexible during the Covid-19 outbreak.
Minister’s spokesperson says arrangements ‘consistent with other employment programs’ but few require group activities
Aboriginal people who work for the dole will have to show up for group activities as usual, despite the government telling service providers that there is a “high likelihood that larger scale community outbreaks [of Covid-19] will occur in the near future”.
The National Indigenous Australians agency (NIAA) wrote to CDP (community development program) providers on Monday to tell them “mutual obligations remain in place at this stage”, meaning that Aboriginal people will still be expected to turn up for work or risk losing their welfare payments.
Errol Graham, a desperately ill man who died of starvation when his benefits were cut off, wrote a moving letter pleading with welfare officials to “judge me fairly” because he was overwhelmed by depression.
The handwritten letter, seen by the Guardian, was released by Graham’s family as they launched a legal attempt to prove that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) acted unlawfully and put him at risk by failing to put in place effective safeguards to protect vulnerable benefit claimants.
Senator says after visiting remote Indigenous communities that many there feel they have not been properly consulted over new card
Independent senator Jacquie Lambie says “the government has a problem” with the rollout of its controversial cashless debit card, after her fact-finding visit to the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Lambie visited several remote Aboriginal communities to “get a view from the ground on how the card is functioning, before voting on the government’s proposed changes for its future”, she said. Most of the people she spoke to “didn’t know any change was being proposed at all”.