Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

Well, Mr President, as you know: to protect the health of Australians, tough decisions had to be made by the government. Part of those decisions were to close down parts of our economy. What did that mean? It meant that businesses, through no fault of their own, had to close their doors. As a result, many jobs across Australia were lost. But what we did as a government was move quickly and decisively to put in place record economic support to support the economy and households to get through COVID-19. As the Leader of the Government in the Senate has already stated today, this included JobKeeper, JobSeeker, the cash-flow boost, the SME guarantee scheme and the early withdrawal of superannuation. We put in place a suite of policies that businesses and Australians were able to look at to see what suited them. As a result of these measures, we have now seen 648,500 jobs return in the last five months. Again, we thank those businesses doing the right thing by Australians and giving them a job.