Australia ends pandemic wage subsidy

SYDNEY: Australia on Sunday ended a pandemic wage subsidy scheme despite official warnings that up to 150,000 people could lose their jobs as a result.

The so-called JobKeeper scheme, which initially saw Aus$1,500 (around US$1,150) a fortnight paid to staff via their employers, was announced last March after Australia imposed a nationwide shutdown that left thousands queueing outside unemployment offices.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the programme had been an "economic lifeline" that has achieved the aim "of saving lives and saving livelihoods" over the past year.

He told reporters in Melbourne there was "no doubt that there will be some businesses that will continue to do it tough" but the subsidies were always designed to be "temporary". Australia’s unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent in February -- down from 7.5 percent in July -- but the Treasury estimates between 100,000 and 150,000 jobs could be lost as a result of the change. Australian Council of Trade Unions president Michele O’Neil said many more workers were likely to see their hours and pay slashed.

"1.1 million workers face an uncertain future without the JobKeeper wage subsidy, which has prevented catastrophic job losses during the pandemic and is now being ripped away," she said. "Cutting off JobKeeper while so many workers are still reliant on it is both cruel and counter-productive to our economic recovery."

At the height of the crisis, the scheme was supporting almost four million jobs. Officials twice extended the programme over the past 12 months, albeit at lower rates as the spread of Covid-19 was brought under control and the economy began to recover.

Australia has been relatively successful in managing the coronavirus -- recording roughly 29,000 cases and less than 1,000 deaths to date -- with recent outbreaks linked to border quarantine facilities generally being quashed quickly. Its economy tipped into recession in the first half of 2020 but grew 3.1 percent in the September-December quarter.

Meanwhile, France will have caught up with Britain on the number of people vaccinated against Covid-19 "in a few weeks", President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on Sunday amid a row with Britain over vaccine access.

France’s inoculation drive has been criticized as slow, with 11.45 percent of French people having received one or more jabs, compared with 43.79 percent of Britons. But Macron told Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) newspaper France had significantly ramped up the pace of inoculation and suggested Britain’s campaign could face headwinds.

"In a few weeks we will have completely caught up with the British, who will meanwhile be increasingly dependent on us to vaccinate their population," he said. His remark appeared to refer to stocks of the Anglo-Swedish vaccine AstraZeneca that are produced in EU member states.

The EU has threatened to ban pharma firms from exporting coronavirus vaccines to Britain and other well-supplied countries until they make good on their promised deliveries to the bloc -- a threat directed mainly at British-based AstraZeneca.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Friday suggested Britain, which has prioritized getting first vaccine doses to as many people as possible, would struggle to obtain the second doses they needed for full protection.

"The United Kingdom has taken great pride in vaccinating well with the first dose except they have a problem with the second dose," he told France Info radio. The row with Britain comes as doctors at Paris hospitals swamped by Covid-19 cases warned they would soon have to start choosing which lives to save.

On Saturday, France recorded an additional 42,619 infections -- several times the target of 5,000 daily cases Macron set in late 2020. The spiralling caseload comes a week after a third of the French population were placed under a loose form of lockdown.

In an open letter in the JDD, 41 medics complained that the measures taken by the government to try tame the third wave were "insufficient" and said they would be at full capacity within two weeks.

"We will be forced to sort patients to try and save as many lives as possible," they warned, adding they had "never experienced a situation like this, not even during the worst (terror) attacks of the past few years." Meanwhile, growing numbers of schools are temporarily closing classrooms over infections among staff and pupils.