AUKUS ‘JobGiver’: a non-recourse handout to overseas companies and workers
The Morrison Government encountered Opposition scorn for failing to include claw-back provisions in its JobKeeper program. Yet the Albanese Government is making the same mistake with its ‘JobGiver’ submarines program.
On 23 November 2021, then-opposition Treasurer Jim Chalmers rose in the House of Representatives and delivered a fiery speech on the performance of the Liberal Coalition Government.
When he spoke about managing the economy, Chalmers mentioned ‘JobKeeper and declared it the “defining example” of Coalition economic mismanagement.
“JobKeeper was a great idea,” he said. “Frydenberg, the butterfingers of Australian politics, got his hands on it and he turned a good program into a program that wasted tens of billions of dollars, and that’s why the Financial Review wrote an article headlined ‘Frydenberg fires JobKeeper missile at himself’. If you look at that piece in the Financial Review, I think the key conclusion is that they describe the current Treasurer as ‘lighter than helium’.”
He went on to describe the economy as a piece of software: “Wasting money is not a bug in this government; it is a feature of this government.”
Three months later, opposition leader Anthony Albanese weighed in, describing to the House a Treasurer who had “not put in place appropriate protections for taxpayers’ interests when it comes to the JobKeeper program, resulting in
over $20 billion going to companies that were increasing their profits.
And that leads us to ‘JobGiver’.
The money sinkhole
On 13 March 2023, Prime Minister Albanese announced in San Diego that the AUKUS submarine program would cost a mind-blowing $368 billion. That’s $13,850 per man, woman, and child in Australia. And that’s not including the cost of managing the spent nuclear fuel for 100,000 years.
At the time he offset the cost issue with a ‘jobs at home’ pitch. “The program will create around 20,000 direct jobs over the next 30 years across industry, the Defence Force and the Australian Public Service including trades workers, operators, technicians, engineers, scientists, submariners and project managers.
In early September 2023, it was revealed that, as part of the program, Australians were to gift almost $4.7B in taxpayer’s money to grow the US submarine industrial base to enable the transfer of US Virginia attack-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.
Along with a similar contribution to the UK, ‘JobGiver’ was born.
JobGiver
Shortly after the announcement, I FOI’ed the Submarine Agency for “The agreement between Australia and the United States that goes to Australia making significant financial contributions into the Submarine Special Activities Account”.
I was concerned about the T’s and C’s. How would the money be spent? When would the money be paid to the US? Was there a clawback provision?
The request was answered with a big fat “access denied”.