Businesses were also reporting that the $5000 relief payment from the State Government was too little, too late and that the red tape involved “was too much effort’’ for such a small return.

Under the State Government scheme there is a $5000 payment for small to medium businesses that have a turnover of more than $75,000 a year and have an annual payroll in Queensland of up to $10 million. They also had to be an employer.

Treasurer Cameron Dick said about 52,000 businesses were eligible for the payment.

The CCIQ said those ineligible included non-employing sole traders which CCIQ said ruled out about 288,000 sole traders in Queensland.

CCIQ’s general manager of policy and advocacy Amanda Rohan said these businesses were the “lifeblood of Queensland and essentially self-employed keeping themselves in a job’’.  

“Those businesses work just as hard to earn a livelihood and contribute to the Queensland economy and similarly, they are just as significantly impacted from COVID lockdowns and restrictions.  

“Businesses are telling us these payments are too little too late _ $5000 is not enough to cover their losses and they’ll have to wait up to two weeks to receive the cash. Others are saying the application process is too much effort for too little return,” Rohan said.  

“They need support now, not in two weeks, to ensure they’re able to maintain their commitment to staff who rely on them for an income, pay ongoing bills and overheads which don’t go away during lockdown and ensure they’re able to plan their recovery to get back to business as soon as possible.  

“These one-size-fits-all’ $5000 grants fail to acknowledge not only how significantly businesses are impacted but the fact different businesses are impacted in different ways.  

“We acknowledge this is some form of support, but businesses are desperate to know details of a long-term plan for recovery, what’s going to happen if there are further lockdowns and what further support packages will be considered.”    

Treasurer Cameron Dick said the economic impact from the lockdown was likely to be around $700 million a week.

He told ABC’s Rebecca Levingston that the Government was working on the process to make sure all of the administrative processes were ready to go. 

“It’ll be about two weeks for those applications to be received, that’ll be one of the fastest processes that has ever been stood up by a State Government – it took four weeks in New “Obviously, we’ll have a very large peak at the start, generally with these sorts of programs we see about 80 per cent of all applications received in the first week, so that creates a large volume to be processed but we will get the money out to bank accounts within a matter of days of applications being processed.

“We will provide time for businesses to apply _ three months _ so they will have three months to apply, that’ll be longer than any other state because we know people are under 

pressure at the moment so they will have up to three months to make an application as well.

“So not every business in every part of Queensland has been impacted by these lockdown in the same way, so we’re aiming to focus the program on the businesses who need it the most.