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The travel industry is pressing for an extension of JobKeeper, or similar financial support, following the daunting news that Australia’s external borders may remain sealed all year – and the Australian Labor Party has thrown its support behind travel agents.

Shadow Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, told Nine’s Today Show that JobKeeper should be extended for the tourism industry.

“I think we are going to have to help bail out the travel agents. I would keep the JobKeeper going there,” Shorten said.

“If the borders can’t open they are still affected but the travel agent, the mums and dad businesses in the high street of the cities and bush, I think we should give them a hand.”

Shorten added that state and federal governments should use local travel agents rather than “overseas-based platforms” to book travel.

AFTA chief executive Darren Rudd said he hoped Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Brendan Murphy, was “being ultraconservative in his prediction that international travel is unlikely to resume until at least 2022”.

Dr Murphy made his forecast, with its explosive implications for Australia’s travel industry, at the weekend. See: Foreign travel this year? ‘Probably no’ but NZ hope remains

The Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) is among those urging a JobKeeper-style wage support program for the industry.

TTF chief executive Margy Osmond told Nine’s Today show that tourism was highly exposed to international border restrictions and domestic tourism could not hope to make up for the lack of international tourists.

“We’re going to need a higher level of support. We’re an industry that is uniquely affected by what happens with borders,” Osmond said.

“We can’t recover as an industry until international borders open and we won’t survive as an industry unless the issues around state borders are sorted out.”

Osmond said the industry would need a “pay-packet support exercise” to ride out the crisis.

AFTA said it had continued to work closely over the Christmas break with Government, new Tourism and Trade Minister Dan Tehan and key members of Parliament across the political spectrum.

Discussions with Austrade and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) were also ongoing.

Rudd said: “Until international travel resumes, the reality is that Australia’s Travel and Tourism sector needs ongoing government support”.

“I have written to a range of key decision makers within the Federal Government including the Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Tourism Minister Dan Tehan to formally raise the need for modification to the design and implementation of the support program for our sector. This is in addition to our ongoing formal and informal discussions over the Christmas break at a ministerial, political and departmental level around the pressing need to finesse the implementation of the Government’s historic $128 million support package”.

“I will be in Canberra for the first week of the Parliamentary sitting (borders permitted) to meet with key parliamentary representatives. While we hope Department of Health secretary Dr Brendan Murphy is being ultraconservative in his prediction that international travel is unlikely to resume until at least 2022, it will be dependent on the rollout and uptake of Covid vaccination across not only our community but also internationally”.

“In speaking to parliamentarians from a range of parties and independents, we are confident they understand the critical importance of keeping the sector afloat. We now need that to be translated into a renamed and repurposed JobKeeper program commencing April 1 specifically for the Travel and Tourism sector.”

Written by Peter Needham