Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/Daniel Pockett)

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is currently learning the hard way a political lesson that, if he’d bothered to ask, Labor veterans of the financial crisis could have offered him for free: no one remembers that you saved the economy, just the money you wasted in doing so.

The Rudd government, with the help of the Reserve Bank, saved Australia from deep recession of the kind that inflicted misery in so many other countries with a well-designed stimulus program that now looks paltry compared to the Morrison government’s economic support programs. But once political business-as-usual resumed, it became the victim of a political counterfactual — hundreds of thousands of jobs hadn’t been lost, and the people who were the beneficiaries of that were none the wiser.  All people saw were the stories of allegations of mismanagement of the school halls program, and the deaths of people employed by shonks and spivs lured into the housing insulation program.

The $16 billion schools halls program turned out to be brilliantly successful — despite an incessant and successful misinformation campaign waged against it by News Corp and the ABC — according to an independent review and an auditor-general’s review. But to this day, voters likely recall only ABC journalists describing it as a “debacle” rather than the 120,000 jobs it supported or the extensive educational infrastructure it left in every school in the country.

JobKeeper, too, was brilliantly successful at keeping people in jobs — hundreds of thousands of them — and if it didn’t save us from recession, it saved us from profound economic dislocation. But it’s likely going to end up being more associated with big corporations and Australia’s wealthiest people taking billions in taxpayer dollars they’re not entitled to. And this time, perceptions of rorting and bungling are well-justified.

Despite the lack of school halls-style ABC or News Corp campaigns attacking JobKeeper, its design flaws have kept returning to the spotlight, courtesy of an assiduous campaign by Labor’s Andrew Leigh, and the public reporting of JobKeeper funds by large companies, many of whom enjoyed spectacular profits in the pandemic, not the 50% drop in revenue that was the threshold for large firms to access the payments.

Joe Aston at the Financial Review has also hammered Frydenberg over and over about the way zero safeguards or clawbacks were built in at the start — and Frydenberg’s apparent insouciance about even finding out how many companies received JobKeeper that shouldn’t have. The contrast with the government’s disgusting and illegal abuse of welfare recipients via Robodebt — for which no minister or senior bureaucrat in Canberra has ever been held accountable — makes Frydenberg’s lack of interest all the more galling.

Despite the treasurer’s complete lack of curiosity, Labor and some journalists have steadily compiled a record of who rorted JobKeeper — and the staggering costs, running into the billions, of companies taking JobKeeper when they enjoyed increased revenue, not falling revenue.

And as a result, Frydenberg can’t afford to be insouciant anymore. The government is sufficiently worried about the issue that Frydenberg fronted 7.30 last night to get a proper grilling from Leigh Sales, and he struggled with his main line, that if some sort of clawback mechanism had been inserted at the start, firms would have been reluctant to participate in the program.

The objection to that is straightforward — a clawback mechanism could have been designed to not deter good faith participation, or with thresholds so that clawback was only triggered by significant diversion from anticipated revenues, or as a percentage of the JobKeeper payments received, so that any firm could have participated knowing they would under no circumstances be worse off, and might even make a small profit from JobKeeper even if they ended up not being qualified.

Whether such mechanisms were discussed within Treasury isn’t clear — it’s hard to believe someone within Treasury didn’t raise the issue, even if nothing was committed to paper.

The only solution for Frydenberg is an inquiry. He could have full judicial review, of the kind that Tony Abbott demanded into the school halls program. If it was good enough for a $16 billion program back in 2010, it’s good for a $90 billion program now. Or he could settle for an independent review by external experts and an ANAO audit, like Labor did. But JobKeeper won’t go away like Frydenberg hoped it would.