They've actually now removed the cap of $150k. We are a medium sized business, we employ around 500 people across ANZ with about 50 in NZ. We have applied for the subsidy for all but about 10 of those as they can work from home. Pretty easy to show a 30% decline (can be a forecast decline) when they are going into lockdown for 4 weeks and ur business is not deemed to be an essential service. It will likely cost them more then $5bn, but to be blatantly honest here, they are paying $585 / week with companies paying the remainder whereas in Australia we have just decided to pay $550 / week when people lose their jobs and that goes for the additional 1m people that have lost their jobs in the last 3 days. Would make more sense to have paid that to businesses and try to keep more people in work, you can't save them all but it goes a long way to preserving as many jobs instead of throwing jobs away like we have done here.
The biggest benefit of doing that, is when we come out of this, if businesses already have trained employees ready to go, the ramp back up would be much much quicker when you come out of this massive economic shock and it also increases confidence in workers, so again when we come out of this, spending will return to a much more normal level far quicker helping the government as it gets that churn around GST etc moving far quicker than a stalled approach which we will have as people have to go through the recruitment process again to get back into work.
