Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Kitching for her question. It's a question that is eerily reminiscent of questions I recall facing at each of the transition points in relation to JobKeeper. When the government announced that there would be a phasing out of JobKeeper after the first six months and we announced the journey to doing so, at each of those transition points the opposition would come in here and ask questions about what would occur and potentially how many jobs would be lost. Yet at each of those transition points to date, we have seen that the number of jobs has kept going up, that more Australian businesses have graduated off JobKeeper, that more Australian employees have graduated off JobKeeper and that the number of people employed across Australia has kept going up—to the point where, as Senator Cash and I have both told the Senate today, total employment across Australia is now back at a level above where it was in March 2020. Total employment is back at the level it was before JobKeeper came into effect.

We acknowledge that there will be, for some businesses, potential challenges ahead. We've always acknowledged that that would be the case. But we've sought throughout the pandemic to put in place the safeguards to get Australia through the worst of it. And now, as we've very clearly come through the worst of the pandemic, through the worst of the economic crisis, we've made those measures more targeted. We've ensured that those measures home in on the parts of the Australian economy—