During his Budget speech earlier this month, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg spruiked that the “new JobMaker hiring credit to encourage businesses to hire younger Australians” would “support around 450,000 jobs for young people”.
However, Treasury official Jenny Wilkinson yesterday told a Senate estimates hearing that the scheme may actually result in just 45,000 additional jobs, as most of the new jobs would most likely have been created without the hiring credit:
On Monday Jenny Wilkinson, the deputy secretary of treasury’s fiscal group, told Senate estimates it was “very hard to judge” whether businesses would have hired a new employee anyway or will have done so only because of the hiring credit.
“In costing this we’ve made a conservative assumption that about 10% of employment is genuinely additional – it would not have happened but for the hiring credit,” she said…
Labor’s shadow employment minister, Brendan O’Connor, said the evidence meant the $4bn program is set to create just 45,000 jobs “costing nearly $90,000 per job”.
He called on Frydenberg to “explain the discrepancy between his inflated jobs number claims compared to treasury’s estimates”.
From the get go, MB has warned that JobMaker will be rorted en masse and will result in businesses shifting their wage bills onto taxpayers, not in more employees, with owners pocketing the extra profits.
The logical thing for any business to do is to cut existing employee hours and hire a bunch of people under the age of 30 or 35 on 20 hours a week. This way, they can pocket subsidies, reduce their out-of-pocket wage costs, earn fatter profits courtesy of the taxpayer, all without actually boosting overall employee hours above what would have occurred anyway as the economy slowly recovers.
The Morrison Government’s JobMaker program is another iteration is really a combined “JobRorter” and “DoleHider” program, since its real goal is to mask the unemployment rate and throw taxpayer subsidies at its business mates.
