Coronavirus crisis: Prime Minister Scott Morrison warns millions in lockdown are a ‘heavy burden’ on economy

Scott Morrison says things will “continue to be tough” for Australia for weeks if not months, with three States currently in lockdown.

But he signalled JobKeeper would not come back, because the situation today “was very different” to what was experienced last year when the payment was introduced.

Instead the Government would continue offering emergency disaster payments to states and territories that had been identified as hotspots and put into “extended” lockdowns.

The Prime Minister conceded there “had been challenges” with the vaccine rollout, which has officially progressed to administer one million doses a week.

“We’ve had our challenges with this program, we’ve had significant challenges with this program as many countries have,” Mr Morrison said.

“But what matters is how you respond. What matters is how you fix the things that need to be fixed, and get the program, doing what it needs to be doing, and hitting the vaccination rates, it needs to hit to ensure that we can get to where we need to be where we want to go.

“Today, with the most recent seven days data, we finally hit that mark of a million doses in arms in a week.”

Mr Morrison said more than 300 more GPs would join the rollout of Pfizer this week, with more pharmacies to come onboard soon.

He conceded the lockdowns of NSW, Victoria and SA would cause a “heavy burden” on the economy, but he was confident it would recover “very very quickly”.

“We anticipate (we) will have an impact on obviously the September quarter GDP, and we’ll have a near term impact on employment,” he said.

“Once we come through these lock downs, whether it’s in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, those economies will return to growth, people will go back to work, people will go back and buy things in the shops, the sites will open again and the economy will come back to life, very, very quickly.”

Mr Morrison confirmed the Government was making a “constant appeal” to Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation to change its advice on AstraZeneca.

He asked States to offer more AstraZeneca in the clinics they ran.

“Well, it's for them to now constantly reconsider how that balance of risk applies and provide the advice,” he said.

“New are encouraging states, just like Victoria did (to) pump an extra 300,000 AstraZeneca vaccines, into the State… so I would encourage states to be using the AstraZeneca vaccines to be dispensing them through those state based clinics to get as many people vaccinated as possible.”

When asked directly if JobKeeper would ever come back, Mr Morrison said reinstating the payment would take too long.

“You solve the problem with the policy responses that you need that’s in front of you, I’m not trying to solve last year’s problem. That’s what JobKeeper solved,” he said.

“I’m trying to solve the issues and provide the economic supports directly to individuals fast.

“You’ll recall that when we put JobKeeper in place, it took four to six weeks in order for the system to be rolled out.

I don’t have six weeks. I need to make sure that we’ve got $200 million out the door now, which is exactly what we’ve done.”

Mr Morrison defended waiting on modelling from the Doherty Institute - due at the end of the month - before putting timeframes on when Australia would move through the four stages of easing pandemic restrictions.

“We are one of the few countries in the world that is scientifically trying to determine what this is, before taking the next step of easing what those restrictions would be, and how it shouldn't be happening in that next phase, and how that will work,” he said.

When asked about his view on mandating vaccines, Mr Morrison said his record on introducing the “no jab no play” policy for childcare when he was Social Services Minister made clear his “disposition” on the issue.

“But they're not things that the Prime Minister or even did the federal government decides,” he said.

He said any measures to mandate vaccines as a condition to move around the country or go to events or specific venues was up to States and Territories.