Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

Can I say, that was an extraordinary contribution from the minister. 'We will not break the laws.' The problem is you didn't make the laws. The problem here is, if there were ever an example that this government is no good with money, that this government can't manage money, it is that the person who has won the competition is the Treasurer. And it's been a tight competition. We first had the now Deputy Prime Minister have a go with overpriced water, but that only made it to $80 million. We had the minister for communications on Leppington Triangle, but he managed to waste only $33 million there. On sports rorts, the minister gone, now returned, managed to waste $100 million. On car park rorts they thought they'd go harder with $660 million. But then the Treasurer arrived and said, 'That's not a rort; this is a rort!'—$13 billion in JobKeeper overpayments, and the only way they can defend it is to talk about the JobKeeper payments that weren't overpayments. I want to hear one moment when they defend this on the basis of what the objection is, because we haven't opposed wage subsidies; we called for wage subsidies. But we have opposed a rort. We have opposed a situation where a company puts in the paperwork and says, 'Yes, I reckon I'm going to have a 30 per cent cut in turnover,' then their profits go up and they get to keep the money anyway.

We get told, 'You voted for this legislation,'—not so fast. Let's remember what happened last year: this parliament had shell legislation brought before it where every single regulation was to be contained in rules that would be set down later by the Treasurer. Not one rule—not one eligibility rule, not one compliance rule—was part of the legislation that went through the parliament. What we never realised was that there weren't going to be any compliance rules further down the track either. That's what the Treasurer has allowed to happen.

It's not like they won't go after overpayments elsewhere. At the moment, families in lockdown zones are receiving notes from the government saying, 'You didn't estimate your income right, so you've got to start paying back your childcare subsidies.' They didn't make the right estimate, so they have to make the repayment. That's the standard for every Australian family. That's the standard for families in areas like my own currently going through the worst of the pandemic and the worst of the lockdown. But it's a completely different standard if you happen to be a company that had increased profits during the pandemic and increased turnover during the pandemic.

My favourite line from the minister was when he said, 'Those opposite just want to nitpick about negative things.' It was a piece of pure oratory. Do you realise the size of this nit? Do you realise the size of what we are talking about—$13 billion! It's the size of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. We get told, 'That had to be spent to keep people in work,'—no, no, no. The $13 billion went to the companies with increased revenue. Those people were already going to keep their jobs.

We get told, 'This kept the businesses going,'—no, no. If the business was increasing its profit, it was going to survive the pandemic anyway. What the government did was, after the parliament, in good faith, in the middle of the pandemic, say, 'You set the rules; we will give you that power.' They wrote down rules that said, 'Free money for our mates, and no compliance rules at all.' What did you think would happen? What did you think would happen with a system with no compliance? What sort of government is willing to chase down $1.7 billion of robodebt but say, 'It's too hard to ever ask anything of companies.' This exact question was put by Katharine Murphy to the Treasurer: 'Why not make them repay JobKeeper given you claw back debt from welfare recipients?' The Treasurer said, 'It's a false analogy, because one is in accordance with the law; the other is not.' Robodebt was illegal. This should've been against the law, and it was the Treasurer who made sure the loophole was there.

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