DAVID KOCH:
Treasurer, good morning to you.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Good morning. Nice to be with you Kochie.
DAVID KOCH:
When you got that phone call Thursday night from the Treasury official, what were the first words to come out of your mouth?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well clearly I was surprised but then I wanted to listen to the explanation…
DAVID KOCH:
No what did you say, ‘you are flaming kidding me’? Or words to that affect?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
No I didn’t use any expletives. I wanted to hear the explanation and then obviously work through the implications of it. But the good news is that, what it means is that the country will be borrowing $60 billion less than otherwise would have occurred. Kochie, Treasury made the forecast for the number of people being on JobKeeper at the height of the pandemic here in Australia when cases were increasing by more than 20 per cent per day and as you know we’ve made great progress on the health front which has delivered this economic benefit.
DAVID KOCH:
Ok just on that then, so the economy is doing much much better than either you or Treasury thought. That when you look back the original JobKeeper over did it, is that what you’re saying?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well the JobKeeper program was always a demand driven program, and so the estimate now is around 3.5 million Australian workers will be on that program and it will still cost about $70 billion…
DAVID KOCH:
So the economy is doing much better?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well the economy did not fall in the hole that it would have fallen into if we’d gone into the lockdown that we saw in Europe. There still has been a very very severe impact on the economy and as you know 5.1 million Australian workers, nearly half the private sector workforce of Australia, is either on JobKeeper or JobSeeker.
DAVID KOCH:
Well a lot of companies that filled in the application got it wrong, it was that instead of putting ‘1’ they put ‘$1500’, the amount. Are those companies, have they been allowed to go back and re-apply because the question was a little confusing, I suppose, for some.
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
Well two points Kochie, the first is that we’re talking about around 1,000 companies of the nearly one million companies that applied so it was actually a very small proportion…
DAVID KOCH:
But they’re little ones too?
JOSH FRYDENBERG:
And it was an inadvertent error, as you say, when they were asked what are the number of eligible employees in their business, instead of putting ‘2’ they put ‘3,000’ thinking that was the amount of money they were going to get from the JobKeeper program. But importantly, that data was not used by the ATO to actually pay out businesses, they used tax file numbers and other declared information, so there were no underpayments or overpayments based on that data. What that data was used for was to tell the Government a certain number of people were on the program and obviously that turned out to be incorrect.
DAVID KOCH:
Alright, okay Treasurer, thank you for joining us.