$484m in wage subsidies paid
tom.pullar-strecker@stuff.co. nz
The Government is not ruling out reviving a scheme under which people made unemployed because of Delta might qualify for Covid income relief payments of $490 a week.
But Finance Minister Grant Robertson said that while that was among the extra support being looked at, the Government did not see a need to bring back the enhanced benefit scheme, assuming its level 4 lockdown worked.
The Covid Income Relief Payment (Cirp) scheme was controversial because of accusations from some critics that it amounted to a ‘‘two-tier’’ welfare system.
For the time being, the Government’s main support scheme for the Delta lockdown remains the reintroduction of its wage subsidy scheme.
Robertson said the Government had also given Inland Revenue discretion to give businesses extra time to pay provisional tax payments that many firms are due to make by Saturday.
Close to 128,000 businesses had applied for wage subsidies, with $484 million paid out to date, Robertson
Finance Minister Grant Robertson
told Parliament’s finance and expenditure select committee on Tuesday.
But he told the committee that as of Monday only one company with more than 100 full-time employees had applied for the subsidies.
A spokesman subsequently clarified the actual statistic was only one company with more than 500 employees.
‘‘I think that is indicative of a number of pieces of feedback I’m hearing from larger corporates – that they are comfortable where they are at the moment and looking forward to us being able to move down the alert levels,’’ Robertson said.
He said the economy had done well over the past year ‘‘to the point that economic activity is back where it was pre-Covid’’.
That meant the Government had ‘‘the ability to deal with the fact that we are now facing this Delta outbreak’’, he said.
Robertson faced criticism from Opposition MPs on the committee for running down the $62 billion Covid Response and Recovery Fund – including through some spending that had tenuous links to the pandemic – to the point where there was only about $5b left unallocated for wage subsidies and other support.
But Robertson indicated there was at least $7.4b still left to spend, as $2b allocated to the Small Business Cashflow Scheme – a loan scheme for small and medium-sized businesses – had not been spent, along with $400m allocated to the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme.
There were smaller portions of unspent money in other allocations, he said.
If the Government needed more funding, it was in a good position to raise that, he indicated.
Robertson said the Government didn’t currently envisage firing up all the schemes it put in place to support people through last year’s lockdown.
‘‘We are obviously thinking about what may happen if we had to extend the lockdown out for a significant period of time, and then we go back to some of the other things we did last time because we know they work,’’ he said.
‘‘That’s things like the winter energy payment, student allowances, the Cirp scheme we had in place for people who lost their jobs. So we’re going to look at all of those again, but I do want to be really clear that at the moment we don’t believe those things are necessary
‘‘As long as alert level 4 does its job, we will be out of this as quickly as possible,’’ he said.