Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Judith Sloan, Janet Albrechtsen and Niki Savva are hardly Labor true believers, but they've been among the fiercest critics of the government's JobKeeper mismanagement, calling the overpayments 'irresponsible', 'inept' and 'inexcusable'.

JobKeeper saved jobs, but so much money was given to firms with rising revenues that the cost of saving each full-year job was up to $200,000. The Parliamentary Budget Office first estimated that $13 billion went to firms with rising revenues in the first six months of the scheme. Then the government said that figure was $14 billion. Now the Parliamentary Budget Office has looked at the full 12-month scheme, and they estimate that $20 billion went to firms with rising revenue. That's $2,000 for every Australian household going to companies that didn't need support—companies whose sales were higher in the pandemic than the year before. Among those who benefited from JobKeeper were offshore billionaires, such as Louis Vuitton's Bernard Arnault and Luxottica's Leonardo Del Vecchio.

If you asked a family in my electorate what they'd do with a spare $2000, they might say they would get the car fixed, donate the money to a homeless shelter or pay down the mortgage. But—Zut alors! Maledetto inferno!—I'm guessing the one thing they wouldn't do is take $2,000 and pop it in the post to French and Italian billionaires.