JOBKEEPER SCHEME WELL MANAGED, BUT YOU WON’T HEAR IT FROM LABOR

A review into JobKeeper during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that found the scheme to be “well managed” and “value for money” has been swept under the carpet by the Labor Government.

Federal Member for Riverina Michael McCormack, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time of the global crisis, said Labor’s preoccupation with political point scoring blinkered its ability to acknowledge good policy.

“You won’t be hearing the Labor Government telling this story,” Mr McCormack said.

“Labor was hoping the independent review it commissioned would serve as a damning indictment of how the Coalition handled the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the report conducted by former senior Treasury official and former International Monetary Fund executive director Nigel Ray said it helped to stabilise the Australian economy during a time of crisis.

“It is easy for Labor to forget these were dire times and decisive, immediate action was required to save lives and livelihoods – which is exactly what was done by the Coalition.

“JobKeeper was an unprecedented scheme for unprecedented circumstances and the report has found the scheme was rolled out with ‘incredible speed and was well managed’ and provided value for money.

“People can be blinded by their political stripes but this report shows the right decisions were made at the right time to steer Australia through the worst economic shock since the Great Depression.

“The former Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, deserves to be particularly commended for his role in JobKeeper and ensuring Australia navigated the murky economic waters of the time with minimum damage.

“Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison also played a pivotal role in ensuring livelihoods were saved and businesses kept afloat.

“I can well remember the many hours we sat through meeting after meeting fine tuning JobKeeper before unveiling this necessary and nation-saving measure.”

JobKeeper was introduced on 30 March 2020 and saved up to 800,000 jobs and prevented large-scale business failures, according to the report. The report said the scheme “played a critical role in addressing the extraordinary and unquantifiable uncertainty at the time of its introduction”. The payment supported 5,800 businesses and 22,000 employees in the Riverina electorate.

The former Coalition Government also supported business in the Riverina electorate through the pandemic with the tax-free cash flow boost which helped around 6,200 small and medium businesses, providing $230 million in payments.

Australia was ranked second in the world for pandemic preparedness on the John Hopkins Center for Health Security’s Global Health Security Index under the former Coalition Government, with JobKeeper the economic centrepiece of the response to the crisis. It put the nation on a path to the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years.