History has just run down and crushed ScoMo, at the AFR:
“We now have one goal in 2020 – to protect the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of Australians through this global crisis, and to ensure that when the recovery comes, and it will, we are well positioned to bounce back strongly on the other side.”
With the government to release later this week a multibillion-dollar coronavirus stimulus package in a bid to avoid recession, the Prime Minister will say that big business has “a huge role to play”, including providing paid leave to workers, as well as casuals, who need time off due to the virus.
Warning companies that they will be forever judged on how they respond over the next six months to “one of those national interest moments”, Mr Morrison, whose package will focus on small and medium enterprises, will call on large businesses to do what they must to keep their workers employed.
After years and decades of crushing job security with:
- endless waves of cheap foreign labour;
- wars on unions;
- deregulation extolling the virtues of flexibility…
we get this pathetic and fallacious apeal to pity.
There is hope that Australia’s informal kurzarbeit labour market will absord some pain. It runs on the decency of ordinary Australians who offer to share reduced hours rather than see head count losses.
But there is equally no doubt that unemployment is about to skyrocket. There will be big job losses and the sharing economy that has worked so well to bury unemployment in underemployment over the past decade is going to collapse.
ScoMo desperation is now so advanced that he has uttered the word “Newstart”, at The Australian:
Pensioners, Newstart recipients and small business owners are expected to be considered for one-off cash payments to help funnel money back into the economy and protect jobs under the Morrison government’s multi-billion-dollar response to the coronavirus.
Scott Morrison will on Tuesday also call on big business to take on some heavy lifting in an act of “patriotism” by fast-tracking the payment of bills to small business suppliers who are facing a cash-flow crunch.
Josh Frydenberg confirmed that the stimulus package, expected to be signed off by the cabinet expenditure review committee on Tuesday, would be substantial, with expectations it could be close to $10bn.
It’a all too little, too late from a PM that has gleefully put the boot into labour for years.
