Before Christmas, LASA was leading the call for an extra $1.3 billion in Government funding over the next 18 months to ‘save’ the ‘hundreds’ of aged care home operators that are trading at a loss every day.
CEO Sean Rooney fronted Sky News last night (pictured above) to again call for an emergency injection of funds.
But then the catastrophic fires generated a commitment by the Federal Government to spend ‘whatever it takes’ to repair lives and communities, kicking off with a $2 billion commitment against a forecast $5 billion surplus in June.
Now the coronavirus outbreak is delivering “bad news on bad news”, says the PwC Australia chief economist Jeremy Thorpe.
He has revealed PwC research in the Sydney Morning Herald today that 20,000 small business and university jobs will be hit as Chinese students and tourists stay home.
PwC research says the impact will wipe out $2.3 billion in Australia’s GDP as potentially $9.2 billion in Chinese spending evaporates.
Government revenue down, more rescue and support funding up.
It is likely that the Government will look to larger aged care operators to come to the rescue of failing regional businesses while metro aged care homes will go under and residents transfer to other homes.
Home care? Will new funding be made available or wait lists just get longer? The latter is more likely.
See the next story.
