The AFR’s Joe Aston has done a terrific job exposing the Morrison Government’s fiscal hawks for being deafly silent on the widespread rorting of the JobKeeper program by businesses, estimated at $25 billion:
The Liberal Dries have been absolutely nowhere on this, presumably bored by budget emergencies and expenditure restraint, only the very point of their existence. Victorian senator James Paterson is barely recognisable from the young purist manufactured by the Institute of Public Affairs. “I’m someone who very much cherishes taxpayer dollars and doesn’t want them spent anywhere that they’re not necessary,” he said, before defending a program that paid $25 billion to firms that never experienced the revenue declines they forecast in order to receive it. “What else could anyone have done in that period of uncertainty that we were in?” Paterson wondered, gormlessly.
Geez, James, how about some rudimentary mechanisms of quality control? A real-time public register, perhaps, or the retesting of recipients’ revenue four or six weeks into the scheme? When you’re turning on a massive fiscal hose and nobody’s watching, senator, when you’re inviting every business in the land into a game show booth of free money, how about just something more than nothing?
