Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Anyone wondering what side the Morrison government is on need only look at the way Mr Morrison is dealing with the JobKeeper rorts saga. While billionaires like Gerry Harvey have pocketed tens of millions of dollars in JobKeeper, the Morrison government has refused to do anything to recover those payments. The independent Parliamentary Budget Office has revealed that $4.6 billion was paid out to companies that actually increased their turnover in the pandemic. For more than 365,000 employers, real-world turnover did not actually fall below the threshold for the April-to-June period last year. These organisations accrued about $12.5 billion in JobKeeper payments during that time. This waste of taxpayer money is morally outrageous.

On the flip side, it has now been revealed that Mr Morrison has issued 11,771 welfare recipients with debt recovery notices for overpayments of JobKeeper. So, if you're a billionaire like Gerry Harvey, Mr Morrison will stand up for you in parliament and protect you. But, if you're a hardworking Australian struggling to get by—perhaps you've lost shifts or lost your job because of the pandemic, a common story for so many—if you're relying on some support from the federal government, from Centrelink, to make ends meet, we know Mr Morrison will hound you to the ends of the earth for every last penny, just as he hounded vulnerable Australians through robodebt, a system he personally set up when he was Minister for Social Services. The Australian middle class is shrinking and it is increasingly being shoved into low-paid, insecure work. (Time expired)