Government leaving workers, tourism industry up in air

Sadly, this wasn't true as over one million casual employees who had been employed for less than 12 months were excluded from the scheme.

Also excluded were thousands of airline catering and ground handling workers employed by dnata, even though they lived and worked in Australia and paid their taxes here - some for decades.

And who could forget that the Morrison government cut JobKeeper for early childhood educators in July last year, breaking a promise that it would be in place for the following six months?

As the COVID pandemic drags on, the Morrison government is continuing its habit of letting people fall through the cracks of Commonwealth economic assistance.

This is the experience of 28 flight crew based in Hobart and hundreds more around Australia.

There are two Commonwealth assistance programs in place to help ensure that airlines can maintain their capacity to fly when borders reopen and flights resume.

However, a number of flight attendants are not covered by these schemes because, instead of being employed directly by their airlines, they are employed under a labour hire arrangement.

This situation is farcical - they wear the same uniform and do the same job as their directly-employed colleagues, yet one group of employees is eligible for Commonwealth assistance and the other isn't.

These workers are facing extreme financial hardship as they struggle to pay their rents or their mortgages, fill their cars with petrol and put food on the table.

One of the workers I met with has been in the industry for over 20 years.

They deserve better than this.

But the consequences go well beyond what the affected workers are experiencing.

Should these workers choose to leave the industry in pursuit of other employment, the airlines will have to hire and train more flight attendants to fill their roles.

This means it could take weeks or even months for airlines to return to their previous capacity after border restrictions are eased.

It is vital for Tasmania's struggling tourism and hospitality industry, and for our state's general economic recovery, that people are able to enter the state when borders reopen.

As a state that relies so heavily on tourism, how can we recover economically if we don't retain trained and capable flight crew?

It is up to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport, Barnaby Joyce, to fix this problem.

Affected flight attendants, their union, the Flight Attendants Association of Australia, the aviation industry and my federal Labor colleagues, Julie Collins, Brian Mitchell and Senator Carol Brown, have all called on Mr Joyce to act, yet these calls have fallen on deaf ears.

The catch cry throughout the COVID pandemic has been that we are all in this together.

But if we are all in this together, why does our federal government keep leaving people behind?

We have lockdowns and border restrictions across Australia because of Scott Morrison and his Liberal government's failures on quarantine and the vaccine rollout.

The least they could do is ensure that the workers and businesses they have failed are given the economic support they need to get through the pandemic.

It is outrageous that Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce have abandoned flight attendants and turned their backs on Tasmania's tourism industry.