Josh Frydenberg. Out of his depth.

Remove this Banner Ad

Christopher Buttersnip

Beware of the Drop Bears
Oct 28, 2020
4,020
10,243
AFL Club
Melbourne
Fraudenberg torn a newie by Joe Aston. What a disaster he has been.

Josh Frydenberg flubs JobKeeper defence

It is actually quite confronting to watch the Treasurer of Australia so out of his depth.

Joe AstonColumnist

Sep 12, 2021 – 6.12pm

Josh Frydenberg is engaging substantively with criticism of JobKeeper’s poor design and maladministration. On Friday, he put his name to a 1400-word opinion piece in The Australian.

Unhappily for Frydenberg, his powers of argument are extraordinarily underdone. He can memorise and recite debating points but their data collide with each other and the logic is circular. If he really understood his own evidence, there’s simply no way he’d be relying upon it. It is actually quite confronting to watch the Treasurer of Australia so out of his depth.

Josh Frydenberg is engaging substantively with criticism of JobKeeper’s poor design and maladministration. Alex Ellinghausen

“New Treasury analysis has found that in the June [2020] quarter … the actual median decline in turnover for JobKeeper recipients was 28 per cent,” he wrote.

Here, Frydenberg is pivoting from hiding behind a meaningless average to hiding behind a meaningless median. He quotes from new Treasury analysis but does not deign to release it.

For 98 per cent of JobKeeper recipients, the required turnover decline was 30 per cent. Therefore, with his 28 per cent median turnover decline, Frydenberg is bragging that roughly half of them shouldn’t have qualified!

Next came Frydenberg’s monster howler. “While it is true that a number of businesses did not experience a fall in turnover in the June quarter by the full anticipated amount … in these same businesses … more than 85,000 employees were stood down on zero hours. Without JobKeeper, these 85,000 jobs would have been lost.”

How on earth can he claim that without JobKeeper, every single one of those workers temporarily stood down would’ve permanently lost their jobs? It’s arrant nonsense. Not a scrap of evidence is provided to support the contention because none exists.

By the end of June, nearly all of them (outside Victoria) were back at work. And Frydenberg continued to pay their employers $750 per week, per employee, for July, August and September.

Say we accept that all 85,000 of those jobs would have been lost – which nobody seriously does – then we next should ask: at what cost did Frydenberg save them?

Thanks to Andrew Leigh’s canny employment of the Parliamentary Budget Office, we know businesses that “did not experience a fall in turnover in the June quarter by the full anticipated amount” received $12.5 billion in JobKeeper.

Over the first six months of JobKeeper, those businesses banked between $29 billion and $35 billion. Even based on the lower figure, 41 per cent of the $71 billion JobKeeper 1.0 was paid to recipients who did not experience their requisite turnover decline.

So saving 85,000 jobs cost $29 billion. That is $339,494 per job for six months, or $678,988 annualised. Were all of these jobs in investment banking?

Put another way, Frydenberg spent $362 per hour per worker, or $13,000 per week per worker. Of course, each of those workers was only given $750 per week, so the other $12,250 per week went straight into the skyrockets of employers. And this is Frydenberg’s explanation.

Incidentally, if Frydenberg spent 41 per cent of JobKeeper 1.0 saving 85,000 jobs, how does he say 100 per cent of the JobKeeper budget saved 700,000 jobs? We’ve all come to expect made-up numbers from an array of cringeworthy backbenchers, but it’s just not good enough from the Commonwealth Treasurer.
 

Log in to remove this ad.

Cookie

Club Legend
May 2, 2004
1,137
1,173
Right in front of you
AFL Club
Western Bulldogs
Other Teams
CreweAlex,SF Giants,Detroit Lions
Gave a speech today about the economics of climate change.

I remember similar ones given by scientists and academics in the late 1990s.

That's how far we are behind due to the stupidity, arrogance and pigheadedness (aka *-wittery) of the Liberals, the Nationals, and long gone independents.

The Lost and Wasted Years continue.
 

Christopher Buttersnip

Beware of the Drop Bears
Oct 28, 2020
4,020
10,243
AFL Club
Melbourne
The clip that should end the member for Kooyong’s career. Not even Morrison could stomach Porter’s mechanism to avoid crystal clear requirements that Ministers disclose donors of substantial gifts. #KooyongVotes @VoicesofKooyong

Margo KingstonDropletFire @margokingston1

 
Jan 12, 2011
25,397
35,576
AFL Club
Collingwood
1632530659984.png
 

(Log in to remove this ad.)

Christopher Buttersnip

Beware of the Drop Bears
Oct 28, 2020
4,020
10,243
AFL Club
Melbourne
A potent and accurate comment extracted from a piece by Prof Jenny Hocking. Hopefully, the peeps of Kooyong will remember that while Fraudenberg is from Victoria he is not for Victoria and kick his sorry arse out of Kooyong.

No Victorian will readily forget Frydenberg’s gloating, mocking, maskless photos from sunny Sydney, his outburst of what Katharine Murphy called “adolescent rancor” against the Victorian premier from the safety of Parliament, while Victorians worked through the long 2020 lockdown.
 
Oct 19, 2020
21,684
31,405
AFL Club
Richmond
If a federal ICAC gets up we'll have a Scott Morrison wing at a jail somewhere just to accommodate members of this government.
He is getting very little press and Labor criticism about his Glasgow recalcitrance.
Most Australians wouldn't even know about it.
Meanwhile Australia takes another step towards being an International pariah.
 

Christopher Buttersnip

Beware of the Drop Bears
Oct 28, 2020
4,020
10,243
AFL Club
Melbourne
Not only this waste and his utter incompetence but turning his back on the state where he resides and continually putting it down. A grub.

 

Remove this Banner Ad

Back