COVID disaster payments to increase by $150 a week…
COVID disaster payments to increase by $150 a week for locked-down Sydneysiders, opened to people on welfare payments.
Key Points:
COVID-19 disaster payments will increase to $750 and $450 a week, depending on hours of work lost.
People already receiving welfare benefits will also be able to claim an additional $200 a week if they have lost work.
The income support payments come as an enhanced business support package was also announced for NSW.
Locked-down Sydneysiders will receive an additional $150 a week if they have lost more than 20 hours of work, or an extra $75 if they have lost fewer than 20 hours, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says.
It brings the COVID-19 disaster payments to $750 a week for people who have lost most of their work, and $450 for those who have lost some of it.
People already receiving welfare payments such as youth allowance or a carers payment will also be able to claim COVID-19 disaster payments for the first time.
They will get $200 a week if they have lost more than eight hours of work, on top of their existing benefits.
"The priority is to ensure we're there to support those that need that help," Mr Morrison said.
"Because this is the task, we will come through the lockdown ... and on the other side we come back strongly, that's what we saw last year."
The increased payments will be made from the start of next week, but the Prime Minister said they would be available from the first week of a lockdown in the future.
New payment matches original JobKeeper scheme
Mr Morrison said the new arrangements would cost the federal government about $750 million a week.
The new disaster payment amount is now the same as JobKeeper was when it began, but the Prime Minister said it would have been wrong to reintroduce the JobKeeper scheme.
"It's not the right solution for the problems we have now," Mr Morrison said.
"We are not dealing with a pandemic outbreak across the whole country ... what we need now is a focused effort of where the need is right now, and so it can be turned on and off."
"JobKeeper did not have that flexibility, it did not have that agility."
Mr Morrison also foreshadowed that payment plans could change again, and that the government would "never set and forget" its support scheme.
"You will remember last year JobKeeper was not our first announcement ... from memory, it was our third," he said.
"We kept upgrading it, and we responded to the evolving nature of the pandemic as we understood it at the time."
Earlier today the NSW and federal governments announced a jointly funded increase to business support payments, providing up to $100,000 a week to affected businesses who have kept their staff.
Larger businesses have also been included in the scheme, with an additional 1,900 businesses now able to make support claims, according to the NSW government.
Source: ABC Sydney