3 years ago
Economic impact of Coronavirus
MATT THISTLETHWAITE MP
MATT THISTLETHWAITE, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES: Good morning. The Coronavirus crisis is not only an unprecedented health crisis, it’s also as an unprecedented economic crisis that’s causing a lot of distress and concern for many Australian workers and their families. We’ve seen 1.5 million Australians are accessing the JobSeeker program during this period. 5.5 million Australians are accessing JobKeeper, it’s putting a lot of pressure on a lot of Australian families when we have some of the highest levels of household debt of anywhere in the world.
What Australian workers and their families need now is leadership and support from the Government. And when they’re seeing things like emails in their inboxes from the likes of Senator Bragg encouraging people to withdraw from their superannuation savings at the moment, that’s not the leadership and support Australian workers want. Particularly in the context that Senator Bragg should know better coming from the Financial Services Council, he should know that a prudent approach to superannuation savings for individuals to seek financial advice regarding their own individual circumstances. They don’t need this anxiety and stress that’s created by an email from a Senator encouraging them to withdraw money from their superannuation savings.
And this has been followed up this week with calls from other Government backbenchers for the JobKeeper program to be shut down quickly when the students return to school. Now I represent an area that has the largest airport in the country in Kingsford Smith Airport, there’s a lot of aviation workers who are going to be out of work for a very long period of time and they don’t need to be reading in the newspapers that the Government should be withdrawing the JobKeeper support as soon as schools return to operation.
So the Prime Minister needs to show some leadership and reign in some of his backbenchers who are causing stress and anxiety to many Australian workers at this point of time. Thanks everyone.
ENDS
What Australian workers and their families need now is leadership and support from the Government. And when they’re seeing things like emails in their inboxes from the likes of Senator Bragg encouraging people to withdraw from their superannuation savings at the moment, that’s not the leadership and support Australian workers want. Particularly in the context that Senator Bragg should know better coming from the Financial Services Council, he should know that a prudent approach to superannuation savings for individuals to seek financial advice regarding their own individual circumstances. They don’t need this anxiety and stress that’s created by an email from a Senator encouraging them to withdraw money from their superannuation savings.
And this has been followed up this week with calls from other Government backbenchers for the JobKeeper program to be shut down quickly when the students return to school. Now I represent an area that has the largest airport in the country in Kingsford Smith Airport, there’s a lot of aviation workers who are going to be out of work for a very long period of time and they don’t need to be reading in the newspapers that the Government should be withdrawing the JobKeeper support as soon as schools return to operation.
So the Prime Minister needs to show some leadership and reign in some of his backbenchers who are causing stress and anxiety to many Australian workers at this point of time. Thanks everyone.
ENDS