COVID-19 pandemic in Australia
On 30 March, the Australian Government said they would spend $130 billion on the "JobKeeper" program. This would pay employers up to $1500 a fortnight for workers that had been in that business for over a year. The business had to have lost 30% of their turnover. For businesses who had made more than $1 billion, their turnover must have dropped by 50%. Businesses pay the Jobseeker money to their staff, instead of their usual wages. This program was to deal with the enormous job losses seen one week before, when about one million Australians lost their jobs. This massive loss in jobs caused the Australian Government's myGov website to crash and lines of people waiting to enter Centrelink offices were hundreds of metres long. The program was backdated to 1 March, to help re-employ the many people who had just lost their jobs in the weeks before. Businesses would receive the JobKeeper money for six months.