Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Vice-President of the Executive Council) Share this | Hansard source

That is a very fair question and it's obviously something that we considered as we designed the program. The JobMaker hiring credit is only available for additional jobs. Employers cannot reduce their current workforce, either by dismissing employees or reducing their hours, and engage new workers performing the same work to receive the hiring credits. We've put some integrity measures in place. The most important ones include the fact that any employer who wants to take advantage of this scheme has to demonstrate that both the size of their payroll as well as the number of employees is going up. So the business's total employee head count, with a minimum of one additional employee from the reference date of 30 September 2020, and the payroll of the business for the reporting period as compared to the three months to 30 September 2020, have to be higher. To demonstrate that the job is additional, those specific criteria must be met, so they must meet these double-barrelled additionality criteria in order to access this credit.

As Senator Sheldon would be aware, all employees also have protections under industrial relations laws from unfair or unlawful dismissal, including non-genuine redundancies, and there are other integrity measures in place to ensure that employers cannot reclassify existing workers from contractors to employees to receive the hiring credit or move employees between entities within a single group. I hope that addresses Senator Sheldon's question.