Finance Minister Simon Birmingham snaps at reporter as he comes under fire for JobKeeper failure

The Finance Minister lost his cool in an interview on JobKeeper, saying ‘of course’ he knew taxpayer money was going to companies thriving amid Covid-19.

The federal Finance Minister has lost his cool on national television after he was peppered with questions about the failings of JobKeeper.

In a fiery interview with 60 Minutes, Simon Birmingham confirmed the federal government had been warned as early as July last year that the scheme benefited – to the tune of $13 billion – companies that actually increased their profits during the pandemic.

Mr Birmingham was then asked by reporter Liam Bartlett why none of the 150,000 companies who received the taxpayer funded scheme have since been ordered to return the payments.

Federal finance Minister Simon Birmingham has defended the JobKeeper scheme. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“What about the public money that was given out? It’s not your money, you realise that don’t you?” Barlett asked.

“You are on the public purse and we are paying you.”

Mr Birmingham hit back, replying: “I don’t need smart a*** questions, thanks.”

“Of course I realise, these are taxpayer dollars … we were looking after the Australian taxpayer,” he said.

Millions of Australian workers benefited from the JobKeeper scheme. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

JobKeeper was urgently brought in in March last year to save jobs when Covid-19 hit. Under the scheme, businesses with a turnover of under $1 billion a year only needed to show, or predict, a 30 per cent fall in turnover.

For larger businesses with a revenue in excess of $1 billion, nothing more than a forecasted fall of 50 per cent was required to qualify.

If the business qualified, the government would help the business to pay their workers $1500 a fortnight.

Three months into the scheme, a treasury report identified the scheme was leaking. An estimated one in six businesses that had forecast losses actually saw their profits increase.

Hundreds of thousands of companies continued to pay their workers using taxpayer dollars, despite recording profit increases. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Mr Birmingham said that type of evidence was “precisely why” eligibility was further refined going into the September quarter.

“(By then) we had the time and the capacity to do so, without running the risk, that by trying to make a program overly complicated without trying to put in place so many different conditions for it, that we would have thousands of people outside the queues of Centrelink offices,” he said.

Originally published as Finance Minister Simon Birmingham snaps at reporter as he comes under fire for JobKeeper failure