Australia news LIVE: Victoria records three new COVID-19 cases as outbreak spreads to aged care

Labor senators have spent this morning in the education and employment estimates pressing the attorney-general’s department on how many workers are in the gig economy, the extent of “insecure work” in the economy and how changes the government made to casual work will play out.

One of those is a right for some casuals to convert to permanent jobs that come with annual leave and sick leave at the cost of the typical 20 per cent casual pay boost. That right has a bunch of qualifications though, around things like whether the worker is getting “regular” hours and if they have been on the job for 12 months and the size of the business.

Labor’s Deborah O’Neill says that there are small business operators, like the 7-Eleven franchisees whose systematic wage theft was reported in 2015, who will use those as loopholes and low paid employees, especially those who are young or speak English as a second language, won’t challenge their bosses.

O’Neill: “Do you really, with all the skills you have as a deputy secretary and the insight that you have, do you really think casual employees are going to avail themselves of the opportunities that are being vaunted by the government as great help for casuals?”

Senior industrial relations bureaucrat Martin Hehir: “Yes Senator, I do believe that. So, certainly there are some employers who aren’t ideal, who behave badly, we’re certainly aware of that. We’ve seen them, they’ve been taken to court, so we’re conscious of those.

“We believe the vast majority of employers want to do the right thing and are looking for support to do that.”

We haven’t reached the afternoon yet but the estimates hearing on health has already devolved into shouting.

It’s all around who is responsible for aged care vaccinations. Labor says the answer to that should be simple, but that’s not so, according to Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck. Here’s just a taste of the exchange.

Senator Katy Gallagher: “You’re responsible for the residents, and now you’re saying you’re not responsible for the staff, it’s a shared responsibility.”

Senator Colbeck: “So what we’ve done is we’ve worked with the states to provide access to the vaccine, aged care.”

Ms Gallagher: “Just tell me, are you responsible, yes or no?”

Mr Colbeck: “Well it’s not a yes or no answer senator, and you know that.”

Ms Gallagher: “No I don’t know that, up until five seconds ago I thought you were responsible for age care staff.”

Senator Colbeck said the Commonwealth was running a cooperative program to roll out the vaccine with states and territories, and aged care workers could get vaccinated through state-run hubs.

Labor senator Murray Watt asked: “Isn’t the federal government responsible for making sure that aged care workers get the vaccine?”

Senator Colbeck said it was a collective responsibility.

“It is not about pitting the states against the Commonwealth in this circumstance, we are cooperatively working on this together,” he said.

Back to today’s economics estimates hearing and Treasury boss Steven Kennedy has revealed workers will be slugged with a real wage cut until 2025 as a direct result of hiking the superannuation guarantee.

Dr Kennedy said the legislated super guarantee hike from 9.5 per cent to 12 per cent by 2025 is a significant factor keeping expected wage growth below inflation. The first 0.5 per cent increase is due next month.

“Roughly speaking a 0.5 [percentage point] increase in the super guarantee means wages are less by about 0.4 [percentage points],” Dr Kennedy said in response to questions from Liberal senator Andrew Bragg at Estimates on Tuesday morning.

Without superannuation rises wages would instead rise by a “small positive in the forwards” on the same model, Dr Kennedy said.

“Obviously [super guarantee rises] are still people’s earnings but they go into super.”

Back to budget estimates and Senators are asking why the Department of Health has not been tracking data on aged care worker vaccinations.

About 70,000 aged care workers have been vaccinated through in-reach programs at aged care facilities, however they are also able to get vaccinated at GP clinics, special pop-up sites and state-run hubs. The data on how many staff have been vaccinated through those other channels is yet to be collated.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert asked Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck why that data collection was not required from the beginning.

“We’ve subsequently put in place a process where we require providers to give us that information,” he said.

Just to refresh your memory, the federal government’s initial goal was to have the majority of the 190,000 disability and aged care residents and roughly 320,000 workers vaccinated in the first six weeks of the rollout. We are now more than three months into the national vaccination program.

“When will you know how many workers in aged care have been vaccinated?” Labor’s Katy Gallagher asked.

Mr Colbeck responded: “We have been working with the sector and the unions to ensure that we have access to the data. And as workers are progressively vaccinated, that reporting data will come to us via the aged care providers.”

Those aged care providers are being surveyed in order to gather the data. Labor Senator Murray Watt asked why it took a second outbreak in Victoria for a survey to be conducted, but Mr Colbeck said that work began some time ago.

“It’s all been based on the fact that we’ve had to redesign the rollout of the vaccination process,” the minister said.

“We have some indications from the survey work that we’ve done, we’ve got some specific data from the direct reporting from the enrichment program, but we don’t have complete data.”

An update on the numbers of vaccinated staff is expected after the morning tea break at 11am. Stay tuned.

Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy has revealed that in the four weeks since the federal government’s $90 billion JobKeeper program ended about 56,000 people reliant on the wage subsidy lost their jobs.

Introductory remarks from Dr Kennedy at Estimates on Tuesday morning included the analysis of payroll data and Australian Bureau of Statistics figures and he said more former JobKeeper recipients could lose their jobs in future.

Treasury previously estimated up to 150,000 people could lose work following the end of the program in late-March. In the first two weeks after the program ended about 40,000 JobKeeper recipients lost employment.

However, Dr Kennedy said about 400,000 people move into and out of employment in a normal month so many of these workers would find other roles relatively quickly and the transition away from the program was “manageable”.

“Early indicators suggest while there have been some job losses associated with the end of the program and there may be more in future, the strength of the labour market has meant that many of these individuals are finding jobs,” he said.

The jobless rate fell to 5.5 per cent in April and, since the end of March, there are 150,000 fewer people receiving unemployment benefits, he said. The ABS did not record a discernible effect on the data due to the end of JobKeeper in the latest data.

“A record number of workers have returned to their previous jobs during this recovery,” Dr Kennedy said. “[JobKeeper] helped ensure firms survived the shut down so they could quickly resume trading once lockdowns had passed.”

Australia’s overall economic recovery for the coronavirus pandemic has been running ahead of expectations, he said, but he added the risk to Australia “remained heightened” with the Victorian outbreak as an example.

“The key issue that affects the economy is outbreaks,” Dr Kennedy said. “The key issue is suppressing the virus.”

I’m tuning in to budget estimates today, as the Department of Health is in the spotlight. Fronting the senate community affairs committee this morning are Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck, Department of Health secretary Professor Brendan Murphy and associate secretary Caroline Edwards.

Already, it’s getting heated. On average across the country the department says 85 per cent of aged care residents have been vaccinated, but officials could not initially give the total number of aged care residents in Victoria who had received first or second doses.

Labor Senator Katy Gallagher was incredulous: “How does the Commonwealth attend estimates, and are not able to tell us how many residents in aged care have had their first dose of vaccine or their second dose?”

Mr Colbeck told Senator Gallagher the Government has given every resident within Victoria’s aged care facilities the opportunity to get vaccinated.

“You can make your emotive statements, that’s fine. We have had a systematic protocol program to roll out the vaccine,” he said.

Officials said all 596 of Victoria’s residential aged care facilities have received first doses, and have 382 had second doses.

“There has been a full coverage of first dose for every single facility in Victoria,” Professor Murphy said.

Ms Edwards later received vaccination data for residents, but could not say how many aged care workers had been vaccinated.

“I can tell you right now that 444,333 total residents have been vaccinated, in aged care in Victoria, and that includes 25,319 who’ve had a second dose,” she said.

Nine Entertainment Co will receive hundreds of millions of dollars to support its newsrooms over the next five years after formalising deals with Google and Facebook for use of content on their platforms.

Industry sources, who spoke anonymously because they had signed non-disclosure agreements, said the two deals were signed early on Tuesday morning, after months of negotiations and the introduction of landmark new media bargaining laws.

Nine is the third major media company to strike a deal with the tech giants. The negotiations took place because of media bargaining laws introduced by the federal government at the end of February, which set out a framework that forces Google and Facebook to broker commercial deals with media companies for the value they gain from having news content on their platforms.

Read the full story here.

While Victoria is yet to provide its daily update, we’ve been able to get a bit more information about the new cases in budget estimates this morning.

Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck says the second potential case in a Victorian aged care resident, reported yesterday, has now been cleared after retesting.

Yesterday we revealed a 99-year-old aged care resident tested positive for COVID-19 and that there was another potential case in a 95-year-old that required further testing. It is the 95-year-old who has been cleared from having coronavirus.

Professor Brendan Murphy also confirmed that none of Victoria’s new community cases were connected to aged care.

We haven’t yet heard when the Victorian government will hold its daily press conference but we’ll be sure to bring you that live later in the day.