Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hughes for his question. No doubt the member for Hughes is a champion of many causes, but the small businesses in his electorate—indeed, all businesses in his electorate and everyone who is working hard each and every day—are who he backs. It's wonderful to report that, yes, the JobKeeper payment has been something that has been spoken about in this House many times, and rightly so. As the Treasurer has outlined on a number of occasions, the enthusiastic take-up of this program has been something that is perhaps unsurprising, but the way in which it is being administered and the way in which it has been rolled out have provided an extraordinary lifeline now for 850,000 Australian businesses. Those 850,000 businesses cover some 5.7 million employees, and both of those numbers are growing.

It's been an extraordinary effort to get to this point, and for those 850,000 businesses, covering 5.7 million employees, the average time that they are waiting to receive their JobKeeper payments is about two to three days. To add to what the Minister for Government Services has said: that has been and has relied upon a huge effort from our Public Service—in this case I want to say a huge effort from the employees and the leadership of the Australian Taxation Office.

Indeed, in my daily reports from the ATO, it's extraordinary to see the volume of traffic that they have been assisting Australian taxpayers with. For example, the average call volume in the last couple of weeks has been 87,000 phone calls a day that they have been attending to. They have extended their hours to very late at night and all weekend. To put that into some context, at this time last year they were attending to 35,000 calls a day, so it has more than doubled. That has relied upon the extraordinary commitment of our members of the ATO, who have delivered for those Australian businesses.

Just before Question Time I was speaking to the Mayor of Melbourne, and we were talking about a range of topics. One of the things that she said to me about the impact it's had on businesses that she has spoken to is that it is obviously not just the direct support and confidence. For those businesses that have tried to pivot—say, food businesses that have moved to takeaway—it has supported that pivot of their business model, because obviously their employees have a largely subsidised wage. So the JobKeeper support that we are providing has been exceptionally important and will continue to be exceptionally important, and I again want to thank our public servants, who have delivered this in such a quick fashion for Australian businesses.

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