Scott Morrison said the National Cabinet was bringing forward a key meeting to review restrictions, after an average of just 20 new COVID-19 cases a day nationally
Following a meeting of National Cabinet today, Mr Morrison said a decision on relaxing coronavirus restrictions would be made next Friday.
“Australians have earned an early mark through the work that they have done,” he said.
“That decision will now be made next Friday, and we’ll be meeting twice over the course of the next week to ensure that we work through the many things that have to be resolved in order to make those decisions.”
Mr Morrison refused to “flag” the particular rules National Cabinet would be looking at, but said it was time to restart the Australian economy.
“We need to restart our economy, we need to restart our society,”
“We can’t keep Australia under the doona.”
“We’ll be looking at all the matters that are currently subject to restrictions, and we’ll be reviewing that and making decisions about which are the ones we can move on.”
Only 1,000 active cases left in Australia
Mr Morrison said there had been “real success on the health front”.
“There are now only 1000 active cases around the country today,” he said.
The Chief Medical Officer Professor Brendan Murphy said Australia’s progress was better than health officials had anticipated it would be.
“We are still consistently seeing only about 20 cases a day,” he said.
“We are doing better than the modelling predicted.”
People urged to download coronavirus app and randomised testing to begin.
Despite the huge progress made, there was still the “missing jigsaw puzzle piece” – a greater take up of the COVIDSafe App.
About 3.5 million Australians have so far downloaded the app, but this will need to increase threefold to be effective.
“We need the app uptake to be higher before we can say that final piece in jigsaw puzzle in contact tracing is there,” Professor Murphy said.
Mr Morrison said the decision on Friday over which restrictions to ease would be determined by the app’s uptake.
“This is a critical issue for National Cabinet when it comes to making decisions next Friday about how restrictions can be eased,” he said.
Read more: Scott Morrison says the COVIDSafe app is our “ticket out” of restrictions
Millions of Australians receive support
Mr Morrison confirmed more than 1.5 million Australians were now on JobSeeker, with more than 900,000 claims processed in the last six weeks.
“This bears out the treasury estimate that suggests unemployment rate will rise to 10 per cent and potentially beyond,” he said.
“JobKeeper registrations are now over 650,000 businesses, over 950,000 applications have accessed their Super, totalling some $7.9 billion in claims.
“More than 340,000 businesses have received a cash flow boost under our cash flow program worth over $6 billion. 6.8 million Australians have received that one-off payment of $750.”
Watch: Australia coronavirus update from Prime Minister Scott Morrison
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