Australian PM Morrison: JobKeeper wage subsidy cut to $1200 a fortnight, split into two tiers

Dhwani Mehta FXStreet

According to the latest story carried by the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is likely to announce a cut in the JobKeeper wage subsidy at the end of September.

The subsidy will be slashed to $1200 a fortnight for full-time workers and to $750 for part-time workers, down from the current single rate of $1500.

Morrison said: "We made the conscious decision to have a flat rate payment [when introducing JobKeeper] because we understood at that time that people were losing second and third jobs."

Additional comments

"Ensuring we had one flat payment across the entire labor force ensured that we were protecting our social security system and you will also remember the great strains that that system was under early during the crisis."

“There was the capacity to have a two-tiered system of payments.”

Market reaction

AUD/USD slipped about 10-pips from multi-day highs of 0.7035 on the above comments and RBA minutes but quickly regained ground to now trade at 0.7026. Focus remains on Governor Lowe’s speech.

Author

Dhwani Mehta

FXStreet

Residing in Mumbai (India), Dhwani is a Senior Analyst and Manager of the Asian session at FXStreet. She has over 10 years of experience in analyzing and covering the global financial markets, with specialization in Forex and commodities markets.

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