Leigh Sales has done a terrific job exposing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s hypocrisy on JobKeeper.
When asked why welfare recipients are being asked to repay coronavirus support ‘overpayments’ while business are not, Josh Frydenberg tied himself in knots:
LEIGH SALES: When a welfare recipient gets their income forecast wrong, they have to repay the Government. When big companies got their income forecasts wrong, the Government let them keep billions. Why the double standard?
JOSH FRYDENBERG: Well actually, both the ATO and Services Australia pursue payments that are not in accordance with the law. In the case of the ATO and JobKeeper, around $200 million dollars has been recouped. In the case of Services Australia, it’s a fundamental principle of our welfare system, that somebody who receives welfare has to disclose their other assessable income, in this case, JobKeeper. Now, when it comes to the broader issue of people – well, businesses’ turnover decline being above or below 30 per cent – the programme was set up based on an anticipated decline in turnover. If we didn’t do that, if we had gone for a percentage of a person’s income or we had gone for an actual decline in turnover, we wouldn’t have got the money out the door. And it turned out that JobKeeper was a very successful programme, that was well-targeted and that had actually delivered the strong economic recovery.
LEIGH SALES: Okay, but to go to your points that you were making – why didn’t you include a clawback feature in the original JobKeeper plan?
JOSH FRYDENBERG: Because if businesses had to show an actual turnover decline, then they may – we wouldn’t have got the money out the door —
LEIGH SALES: No, no! But, with the same as welfare. You would have looked at it later.
JOSH FRYDENBERG: It’s a very different approach. You got to go back to what we’ve —
LEIGH SALES: How is it a different approach? It’s exactly the same thing.
JOSH FRYDENBERG: Because in both cases, we pursue people who break the law. But if you go back Leigh, to what we encountered in March of last year, when we introduced JobKeeper, we were staring into the economic abyss…
LEIGH SALES: But you point out the economic benefits of JobKeeper, that nobody disputes – the jobs saved and all the rest of it. But those jobs weren’t saved in companies that increased their turnover though. Those companies didn’t need help saving jobs. They were making money hand-over-fist to pay their staff.
JOSH FRYDENBERG: Well, I put it to you that a lot of businesses were doing it tough then —
LEIGH SALES: Not the ones that got increased turnover… it brings me back to the original point, which is why didn’t you include a clawback provision in the original plan… like there are, as you point out, for individual welfare recipients?
JOSH FRYDENBERG: Well, I put it to you that the businesses that received JobKeeper were in the face of one of the biggest economic crises this country has ever seen.
So Josh Frydenberg’s argument is as follows:
- Welfare recipients are required to repay overpayments because we made them legally required to do so.
- But businesses that received JobKeeper overpayments are not required to repay because we did not make them legally required to do so.
This goes to show that there is one rule for the unemployed and another for the Coalition’s business mates. Social welfare is frowned upon and wasteful, whereas corporate welfare is virtuous in the Coalition’s eyes.
New Zealand, Canada and the UK all provide open access to who received what in these programs. The repayment rate under New Zealand’s wage subsidy scheme is also 22-times greater than the repayment rate under JobKeeper.
So why is Josh Frydenberg so determined to hide the truth by preventing disclosure?
Again, it’s curious how the Coalition’s army of ‘fiscal hawks’ have suddenly gone deathly silent.
