Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, he has a glass jaw and the fact is that he was smiling. Now, $42½ billion has already gone out through JobKeeper to Australian workers. More than 3½ million Australian workers and around one million Australian businesses are benefiting from JobKeeper. The honourable member knows that JobKeeper is a remarkable program. If he's not going to take my word for it, these are the words of the governor of the Reserve Bank: 'a remarkable program that is helping to save jobs'. As I've said to this House, Treasury has estimated that some 700,000 Australian jobs have been saved by JobKeeper. Without JobKeeper, the unemployment rate would be five percentage points higher than it is today.

The member for Rankin should listen to his own previous words. He said, in relation to JobKeeper, that we should be looking at a kind of tapering. He said that on ABC's The Business. Then the member for Grayndler said on the Today show that we will need a tapering off. He was asked: 'What does that mean?' He said: 'It will go down over time.' The member for Grayndler said about JobKeeper on the ABC's News Breakfast:

We obviously do need to shift away. These mechanisms won’t be in place forever, …

The member for Grayndler then went on John Laws radio and said of JobKeeper:

… we'll need some sort of a transition.

The member for Grayndler, the Leader of the Opposition, then had a doorstop and said in relation to JobKeeper: … we need a transition …

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