Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to reports that his government is trying to claw back $32 million from low-income individuals, including age pensioners, who received JobKeeper payments. Why is the government harassing and targeting ordinary Australians but refusing to demand a refund from big corporations who banked $13 billion in JobKeeper payments whilst their earnings and profits grew last year?

Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Workforce, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. As everyone in the House knows, governments of all persuasions have a responsibility to ensure that debts are recovered fairly, lawfully, transparently and respectfully. For example, as at August, $296.6 million in overpayments has been recovered by the ATO, of which $185 million in cash has been recovered. The ATO was fulfilling its responsibilities—in this case, almost a third of a billion dollars—in recovering.

The same issue and the same standard applies to Australians. When JobSeeker and JobKeeper were put into the Australian population, it was quite clear that Australians knew that you could not claim both. Indeed, the customer journey for every Australian when they went online or used a telephony service was that they had to read through and acknowledge that in the same format and standard as if you were acknowledging it in a statutory declaration. It is a requirement of the law that all Services Australia, government services or human services ministers have worked under for decades. And they had to actually state that they were not taking JobSeeker and JobKeeper. The government has a responsibility, as all governments have had over the decades, to do targeted compliance as required by the Australian National Audit Office. That compliance showed that a number of Australians had, unfortunately, claimed both of them. The law requires the government to respectfully go back to those Australians to point out to them that they have claimed both JobSeeker and JobKeeper.

Mr Shorten interjecting—

The Leader of the Opposition says this is about a fair go. With great respect, Sir, it is actually about following the law—and the law requires that overpayments are not allowed. The laws being administered by the ATO—with $296 million worth of overpayments recovered—require that you can't receive both JobKeeper and JobSeeker. Every Australian who applied for it acknowledged that they couldn't receive both of those payments. Services Australia is now going forward transparently and respectfully to say, 'You've claimed both,' and is seeking to recover the debt lawfully, as required, which all governments have been required to do for decades and decades and decades. That's the standard of the highly targeted welfare system that all Australians enjoy and that many members of the Leader of the Opposition's frontbench have administered over the years.