Ministers have suggested states should pick up the cost of Covid leave payments as calls grow for support to continue
Anthony Albanese has continued to dig in against calls to extend pandemic leave payments, while his ministers have argued states should take up the slack from the federal government.
“There was enormous waste there in the budget; had, for example, the government not given literally tens of billions of dollars to companies that were increasing their profits, there would have been more space in the budget to make the decisions that we would want to make,” Albanese told reporters in Fiji.
The health minister, Mark Butler, told Radio National the public “wants the country to move to a new phase in confronting this pandemic”. “There’s no end to the list of worthy, important things we could be spending money on in the health portfolio … but there is an end to the money.”
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