Australian freelancers are again being excluded from Federal Budget
$98 billion grants are being allocated to the COVID-19 response and recovery in the 2020-21 Federal Budget, coupled with numerous incentives and concessions for businesses all over the country. The newest initiative is the JobMaker Plan, which has been allocated $74 billion to aid job creation and employment in Australia. This is in addition to the $299 billion in the government’s initial COVID-19 response.
Unfortunately, a significant group of people in Australia has once again fell through the cracks - freelancers and contractors. The corona crisis has severely impacted the number of gigs, projects or assignments that freelancers are obtaining, which in turn affects their income.
Moreover, with more people unemployed in the wake of the economic recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there is increased competition for less work, hence driving down the rates and income of freelancers tremendously in the past few months. With less work and smaller margin, freelancers are struggling financially with little aid from the government.
Freelancers who we interviewed recently commented that it has been increasingly harder to obtain jobs from popular freelance market platforms due to the boom in the number of freelancers registering and applying for work, while income per project has fallen drastically because of increased competition. A few freelancers even mentioned that some jobs gotten through other freelance market platforms barely covered the costs incurred by the freelancers, hence is not sustainable in the long term.
Australia Freelance Market eliminates the need for negotiation of rates, through our transparent model of displaying fixed hourly rates for each freelancer. We also ensure that freelancers are free to obtain recurring or repeated projects from each client at no additional cost. This means high quality work from our freelancers, in order to build a good working relationship with clients to increase the opportunities for recurring work.
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This article was published in the Australia Freelance Market News 82.