Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Senator McMahon said at the commencement of her remarks that she was confused. That was the strongest part of her contribution and nothing that she said over the succeeding five minutes did anything to undermine her perspicacity in making that original remark. I think, in fact, the government itself is wilfully confused. It is absolutely determined to put its own interests, and the interests of its mates, ahead of the interests of the people in Australia who they should actually be looking after.

We are in the depths of a social, public health and economic crisis. More than half of the country is in lockdown. In some parts of the country, like here in Sydney, it's with no end in sight because of the government's failure on vaccines. In the middle of this crisis, when people are uncertain about their jobs and household incomes and fearful for the future, the Morrison government has decided to issue 11,771 of our most vulnerable Australians, the people least secure in this COVID crisis, with debt notices because of JobKeeper. These debt notices are for amounts of money that may be nothing to the people who sit on the government side of the chamber—a few hundred dollars here or a few thousand dollars there—but those notices will strike absolute fear into families right across the country. It is hypocrisy. I may well be in Sydney and not in Canberra with you today, but I can smell the hypocrisy from here. You can see the absolute misallocation of priorities and you can see the absolute wilful determination of this government to look after itself and its mates rather than looking after the interests of ordinary Australians.

Contrast the approach of the government in terms of compliance and going after welfare recipients with its approach on two other issues. Previous senators have pointed out that the government's approach to corporate recipients of JobKeeper is entirely different. One company, Harvey Norman, received $22 million. It recorded a $462 million profit—half of that on the back of taxpayer receipts. Mr Harvey alone received $78 million. Thirty ASX companies recorded higher profits and received hundreds of millions of dollars in JobKeeper allowance, a complete misallocation of resources and priorities—problems that were easy to foresee.

Contrast this with the government's approach to public money when it's looking at its own interests. Every week there is another rort scheme. It was sports rorts—over $100 million—where public money was misdirected away from the interests of community sports clubs to the Morrison government's own re-election prospects. There were the community development rorts—hundreds of millions of dollars allocated in an entirely partisan way. There were regional rorts—hundreds of millions of dollars allocated in an intensely partisan way for the government's own narrow political priorities. There were infrastructure rorts. And, of course, this week we discovered car park rorts, where the government has allocated money in an entirely partisan way and has ignored all the recommendations of the department to allocate money to marginal electorates, some of which didn't even have a railway station adjacent to the car park they were building. The money was allocated in an entirely political way.

There's no interest in accountability for hundreds of millions of dollars—billions of dollars—misused for the Morrison government's narrow partisan interests. There's no interest in public accountability or in recovering billions of dollars that's been shovelled out the door—not to achieve its purpose of protecting people's jobs but to lift corporate profits, lift shareholder dividends and lift executive salaries—and produced zero jobs in the process. This government has entirely lost its way. It has lost its capacity to act in the public interest. It's got no interest in that accountability. It just wants to put pressure on ordinary Australians who are the most vulnerable. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.