Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] JobKeeper is a good policy that was implemented badly. The positive impact of a national wage subsidy was never in doubt on this side of the House. It's why we proposed it and why, in the national interest, we continued to urge the government to implement it, despite the Prime Minister dismissing it as a very dangerous idea. But we never backed JobKeeper being abused. It became clear pretty early on that businesses were pocketing public money that they did not need.

Gaining access to the public purse was pretty easy. Businesses just had to predict a downturn in revenue as a result of the pandemic. Fair enough—the money had to get out the door pretty quickly and nobody wanted it bogged down in red tape. But the government never thought to include a clause to pay back the money if the predictions of a downturn never eventuated. The result is that $13 billion of public money has been paid to businesses whose profits went up. Their profits increased over the year, and there's no mechanism that compels those businesses to repay that money. Businesses who never predicted a downturn got nothing. So there are businesses out there that did the right thing—they never put in a prediction that their revenue would go down—but there is no JobKeeper money for them. In a competitive environment, they are at a disadvantage. Make no mistake, this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, and most expensive policy blunders in this nation's history, and Treasurer Frydenberg has his fingers all over it.

Labor supported and continues to support JobKeeper. A cursory glance of the record shows we have always said that it was cut far too early, and the tragic events across New South Wales and Victoria demonstrate that we were right. JobKeeper should never have been cut when it was. It ended too early.

The Treasurer had the power to close the loophole. He always had that power. He could have simply inserted a requirement that money be repaid if predictions of poor revenue never eventuated. He chose not to act. He made a deliberate choice to transfer $13 billion from the public purse to corporate Australia. The Treasurer has fought every attempt to shed light on this financial fiasco, and I would like to pay tribute to my colleague the member for Fenner, who has led the charge on this issue—relentlessly exposing at every opportunity the magnitude of the Treasurer's failure.

Thirteen billion dollars: that's 413 million Pfizer vaccines. That could build 688 primary schools or 29,000 homes during a housing crisis, or it could fund 32½ thousand quarantine facility places. That is the cost of this failure, because every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar that can't be spent on something else. When you give $13 billion to profitable businesses, that's $13 billion that's not available for other things and that then becomes a question of priorities.

What is only too clear is that this government have the wrong priorities. The Liberals have absolutely junked the traditional Australian values of fairness and good governance in order to pursue a radical, American-style agenda, an agenda that gives public money—rare, precious, sacred public money—to millionaires and billionaires whilst squeezing the poor for every cent. Pensioners on Centrelink have to repay every cent of overpayment whilst CEOs can keep the millions they never needed. And the Treasurer's excuse? Overclaiming Centrelink is illegal, but businesses overclaiming JobKeeper isn't illegal. But it's only legal because the Treasurer failed to fix the law. Businesses should pay it back—they must pay it back—but they don't have to, because the Treasurer failed to do his job.

It shouldn't matter whether it's Centrelink or JobKeeper, the principles should be the same for every Australian. Whether you're a pensioner, the president of a board or the president of a company, the same rules should apply. We have means-tested income support in this country. Companies that didn't need the money should pay it back. The Treasurer has failed his job by failing to make sure they do pay it back. I call upon the leaders of businesses in Australia to do the right thing by the country and pay the money back.

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