Sam McMahon (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to respond to senators who have taken note of answers to the questions from Senator Bilyk to Senator Birmingham. I must admit I am a little bit confused and perplexed—having conniptions, even. When we first talked about JobKeeper, when the Prime Minister first announced JobKeeper, those on the other side canned it: 'It'll never work. What a stupid idea.' It turns out that they were wrong. In fact, they were more than wrong. This was a revolutionary scheme. It hadn't been done anywhere around the world on the scale proposed here, and it turns out it was a wonderful scheme that saved many, many jobs and many, many businesses.

Let's face it: we all understand—well, at least, those of us on this side understand—that the vast majority of Australians who are employed in private enterprise are employed in small to medium businesses. So there's literally no point in saving jobs. You can sit someone down in a corner and you can pay them money to keep training for their job, but if they're not working for a business that job doesn't exist. You can save them and you can keep paying them and keep them ready to work, but if, in the meantime, all of those businesses that employ those workers cease to exist, then you've got nothing for them to come back to. So, despite the criticism from Labor, JobKeeper was a very, very good thing that this government brought in. I'm constantly told by businesses in the Northern Territory as I travel around: 'Thank you. It was JobKeeper that saved us. We would not be here today if it weren't for JobKeeper.'

On this side of the chamber, we seem to have not gotten the crystal ball that those on the other side have, because they seem to be able to look into it and predict what's going to happen. There was doom and gloom at the start. The whole country was locked down. There were predictions of huge levels of unemployment. We thought many people would be unemployed and many businesses would go under and we would have no economy left when we finally got on top of the pandemic. We felt that on this side as well. We thought that this was going to be a tragedy and that we had to step in and do something to stop that from happening. And we did. We stood up and we got in with JobKeeper, saving those businesses.

We couldn't predict how the pandemic would go and how the economy would respond. Some quite amazing things happened that we certainly didn't predict, that nobody predicted. I was amazed in the Northern Territory at the time of the first lockdown. Fortunately, we have only had one tiny one since. We are very lucky. But I went around talking to businesses, seeing how they innovated and managed to get through, including businesses that, in fact, thrived in the lockdown. I remember speaking to one particular business in Tennant Creek. It was a family run business and they thought that they were going to go under. But it turned out they became incredibly busy. They had a few different businesses and one of them was supplying skip bins. Who would have thought that a pandemic would create a demand for skip bins? Yet it did, because everyone was cleaning out their homes and yards and needing to dispose of things. So this business boomed. Many other businesses boomed and many have recovered and are doing really well.

Now they're trying to penalise us and criticising us for the fact that we did something that helped business not only survive but thrive. We now have an obligation to taxpayers to recover money that was either paid accidentally or in some cases claimed deliberately when it shouldn't have been paid. There is nothing wrong with that. We are not targeting poor people. This is across the board to anybody who received payments that they were not entitled to. There is nothing wrong with recovering funds on behalf of taxpayers— (Time expired)