Economist Angela Jackson will join an epidemiologist and a public administration expert in leading the COVID inquiry.
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00:00 Will invitations be issued by your Secretariat to state governments?
00:06 If so, reaching back how far?
00:09 Would you, for instance, consider it worthwhile to ask premiers who have since left office
00:15 to front?
00:16 Look, it's probably a bit early to say who we'll be thinking about talking to in terms
00:20 of the inquiry.
00:21 There will be sort of decisions that get made in the coming months in terms of who we talk
00:26 to.
00:27 But certainly, I think, hopefully, we will certainly have interactions with state governments
00:33 about their response and certainly their interactions with the Commonwealth, because they're going
00:36 to have views about the Commonwealth response, obviously.
00:39 Alright, well enough on the broad brush and the rules that you'll be working under, Angela
00:44 Jackson.
00:45 Maybe a few thoughts from you on substantive matters that no doubt will fall before you.
00:50 Economic supports in total, more than $300 billion worth.
00:54 JobKeeper at $88 billion, the biggest single one among that category.
00:59 What's your view on JobKeeper?
01:03 Was it too generous?
01:04 Would or should it ever be designed in this fashion again?
01:07 Well, there's obviously a separate inquiry looking at that right now, led by Nigel Ray.
01:13 So we will obviously consider that and consider that what his findings are and his recommendations.
01:19 I think we do have to remember that this was all designed at a time of high pressure.
01:25 There possibly could have been better design features and people have, and I've been on
01:28 the record saying before, thinking around clawback and ensuring that people didn't benefit
01:33 when maybe they didn't need it.
01:35 But certainly, I think going forward, it will be therefore good.
01:38 And why this review itself is so important is, you know, we're not in a crisis situation
01:43 here.
01:44 So we can think about things much more sort of comprehensively and think ahead about,
01:49 well, how would a better response, what would have a better response been?
01:53 And that really is the purpose of this inquiry across the board.
01:56 We have the benefit of hindsight.
01:58 We have the benefit that we're not in the middle of a pandemic to really look closely
02:02 at all those decisions and all those frameworks and what the government did.
02:06 And there was so much that the Commonwealth did during that period.
02:09 And think again about, well, what might have been a better approach?
02:12 And if we had to do this again, how would we do it?
02:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]