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The Australian Tourism Industry Council says thank you to the Australian Parliament.
Thank you for passing this substantive $130 billion JobKeeper payment scheme.
Whist our industry has highlighted the issue of a large casualised and seasonal workforce
which help deliver Australia’s global leading tourism product, and one that includes many
workers with temporary visa status, this is clearly an unprecedented package that’s right
for the times.

The JobKeeper scheme will provide much needed support to hundreds of thousands of
tourism enterprises and their permanent workforce as our industry collectively faces the
darkest of times.

ATIC represents thousands of local tourism enterprises, where a feature of our industry is
over 90% of 300,000 still registered tourism businesses are small to medium enterprises
and sole traders that collectively employed 1 million people prior to the COVID-19 crisis.
ATIC Executive Director Simon Westaway said the JobKeeper payment scheme is a
lifeline and offers real hope to Australian tourism enterprises for them to stay resilient, stay
sustainable and be able to look to a future recovery.

“JobKeeper can help preserve the productive capacity of Australian tourism enterprises.
And what will truly do so is our country soon getting on top of COVID-19!”, Mr Westaway
said.

“We naturally urge the Federal bureaucracy to efficiently meet the first scheduled
payments to eligible businesses designed to keep their people during the first week of
May.”

Mr Westaway urged eligible Australian tourism businesses and associated not for profit
organisations within the visitor economy to apply for the payment online and if able to
register their interest to do so via ato.gov.au