David Crowe Nick Bonyhady
Australians are being warned of a long road out of the coronavirus crisis in a new alert on the need for strict shutdowns, as Parliament approved the $130 billion JobKeeper wage subsidy in the hope it will be needed for only six months.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the crisis could last ‘‘far longer’’ than the time frame set in the huge economic measure offering $1500 per fortnight to 6 million workers.
Details of the JobKeeper package showed that employers that knowingly breached the new law could face fines of up to $610,000, while those that defrauded the system could face criminal penalties.
The government is canvassing the idea of allowing shutdowns to be eased in some cities over time to gauge the impact on COVID-19 case numbers, in a staged plan to emerge from the crisis.
‘‘We have a long way to go. Through the actions we have taken to date, we have bought valuable time to chart a way out over the next six months,’’ Mr Morrison told Parliament yesterday in the one-day sitting.
‘‘But there are no guarantees, and it could well take far longer.
‘‘Our country will look different on the other side.’’ Government modelling released on Tuesday did not put a time frame on the crisis but canvassed several models including ‘‘scenario four’’, where the infection rate was kept to just 11.6 per cent of the population as a result of quarantine, isolation and social distancing measures.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said that scenario would mean about 3 million Australians contracting the virus, but even that was now well above the government’s worst case.
‘‘We’ve now boosted [the health system] capacity dramatically, and at the same time we have contained and now we’re in the suppression phase of the virus,’’ he said.
Without a vaccine to counter the virus over the next 12 to 18 months, however, experts have debated whether Australia would have to accept more infections and possibly ‘‘herd immunity’’ to build the country’s resistance to the disease.
‘‘Some people had talked about this idea of herd immunity – we’ve rejected that as a country because herd immunity is 60 per cent of the population,’’ Mr Hunt said. He said that would mean the infection of 15 million people and a ‘‘catastrophic loss of human life’’.
‘‘That’s not a theory which the Australian government or the national cabinet have been considering or proposing. We reject it,’’ he said.
‘‘I won’t speculate on time, but the more successful we are at suppressing community transmission, that gives us the freedom to move earlier on a measure-by-measure and a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.’’
The JobKeeper bill passed the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon and was on track to pass the Senate later in the night.