The Labor Party has wasted no time in capitalising on the Federal Government’s casual $60 billion JobKeeper fuck-up, digging up Scott Morrison‘s old speeches about money management.
This afternoon, Labor leader Anthony Albanese posted some archived footage of ScoMo making some choice declarations – “if you can’t manage money, you can’t run the country” – followed by a montage of various news segments reporting “the biggest accounting error in Australian history”.
“We couldn’t have said it better ourselves,” the ad concludes.
If you can’t manage money, you can’t run the country. pic.twitter.com/4dKtkdzMXZ
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) May 26, 2020
In case you missed it, the Treasury and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) revealed that the JobKeeper payment scheme had been downgraded by $60 billion after a major reporting blunder.
“For weeks the Morrison Government has been telling casuals and other excluded workers that the JobKeeper program was full,” Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers tweeted, “when in reality it was three million workers short.”
Despite the fact that JobKeeper will now cost, you know, a whole $60 billion less than initially forecast, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg revealed that there were no plans to increase the scope of the scheme.
“We’ve got no plans to make wholesale changes to the eligibility criteria,” Frydenberg told ABC’s News Breakfast, despite casuals, migrant workers and some university staff being unable to to access the payment.
The government’s expected to review JobKeeper next month but, at this rate, it looks very unlikely that mystical $60 billion will be funnelled back into the system.
