Eligibility rules and wait times left many unsupported

Many stood-down workers and business owners still stuck in Melbourne’s latest lockdown are wading through the fine print to find they are not eligible for new wage subsidies, or that grants will hardly make a dent in their losses.

This is Melbourne’s first COVID lockdown without the wage subsidy JobKeeper and with the JobSeeker payment back down close to its pre-COVID level.The “temporary COVID disaster payment” is not just for people in the current lockdown.From now on, people who lose work in any state or territory that goes into a lockdown of longer than seven days will be able to access the support, but only from week two onwards.

The person has to be able to prove their lost income, cannot have access to sick leave, must have less than $10,000 in savings, and cannot be receiving any welfare support such as JobSeeker or the Parenting Payment.

But not everybody is eligible

The federal government has indicated that people would only get the COVID disaster payments after seven days of lockdown, meaning they would not get compensated for the first week.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Emergency Management Australia said the COVID disaster payment is “to get people through a short lockdown where they cannot access their regular paid employment and have no other support or entitlements to fall back on”. Applications for the $500 payment do not open until Tuesday.

The spokesperson did not answer questions about how long it would take for people to get payments once they applied, but said “once the claim is approved they should receive the payment the next day”.

People who received JobSeeker also ineligible

Charmaine Crowe from the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) said that some people defaulting to the highest Parenting Payment may wind up with more cash than the $500 limit, depending on their circumstances and their number of children.

Her main concern is that many workers would be defaulting to the lower base rate of JobSeeker. She said many people were still listed as being on Centrelink’s JobSeeker payment despite not claiming it regularly, due to working casual jobs. The Department of Social Services data from March 2021 showed there were 280,000 people in JobSeeker is currently set at $310 a week for a single, plus rent assistance.

Fortnightly income between $150 and $256 reduces fortnightly payments by 50 cents in the dollar, and after that it is 60 cents in the dollar.The federal government is giving people who worked fewer than 20 hours pre-lockdown a lower disaster relief supplement of $325, which is marginally higher than JobSeeker. Others are finding that they cannot get the $500 supplement because they have savings.The Federal Treasurer’s office could not yet supply data on roughly how many Victorians it expected to qualify for the COVID disaster relief scheme.