Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Until yesterday, conservative loyalty to the federal government had largely protected Josh Frydenberg and Scott Morrison from attacks over excessive secrecy and largesse related to the extraordinarily wasteful $90 billion JobKeeper program.

News Corp is still yet to unleash the dogs of war, but yesterday it was Judith Sloan in The Spectator — not her weekly column for The Australian — who stepped up to the plate. And boy, she didn’t miss.

Under the headline “JobKeeper — far worse than school halls and pink batts”, the former Westfield, Santos and ABC director declared the program “the new gold standard in wasteful spending”. It warrants a royal commission, she wrote, because it was “the single most irresponsible and reckless spending program ever undertaken by a government”.

In what amounted to a sweeping attack on those who accessed the scheme, Sloan declared that: 

Josh Frydenberg implemented a program with an extremely high proportion of pointless spending, snapped up by businesses that were good at working the system rather than being hurt by COVID.

Sloan believes that at least $25 billion of the program was “completely wasted” and then went on to call for transparency by demanding that all recipients be publicly named on a register, similar to what occurred in New Zealand, the UK and the US.

Sloan is not alone in coming for JobKeeper. 60 Minutes is letting fly on Sunday night, declaring the scheme “the biggest cash grab in Australian history”.

However, as AFR Rear Window columnist Joe Aston pointed out in today’s paper, Frydenberg was not prepared to front up to Nine’s Liam Bartlett for 60 Minutes, instead sending out the hapless Simon Birmingham — who wasn’t even finance minister when Frydenberg, Morrison and former finance minister Mathias Cormann cooked up the JobKeeper scheme.

If the government won’t embrace JobKeeper transparency, there are plenty in the media prepared to assist. And when you end up relying on Pauline Hanson to head off a Senate transparency push on JobKeeper recipients, you really are skating on thin ice.

However, the Parliamentary Budget Office has helped overcome this secrecy by producing stunning analysis which has been best captured in separate pieces by 7.30‘s Dan Conifer.

For a scheme that was only meant to go to employers suffering material drops in revenue, it truly is staggering that $368 million was paid out to entities that more than tripled their revenue in the June quarter last year.

Surely these firms should be forced to give the money back. If only the ATO would awake from its slumber and start asking the hard questions.

Some of the commercial media are stuck in a quandary over JobKeeper, given that several of the larger players really tucked into the scheme. Nine chairman Peter Costello sniffed the political breeze early and elected to pay back the $2 million that the company initially claimed.

Seven West Media took the alternative course and milked $47 million out of JobKeeper, even though the company’s revenue jumped $43.6 million, up to $1.27 billion, in 2020-21, and group EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) soared from $95 million to $229 million.

If you were Frydenberg and Morrison, what would you do to head off this growing scandal at the pass?

The first obvious choice is to embrace transparency by declaring there will be a public register, but not until closer to Christmas, once the current lockdowns have been lifted.

This would give firms enough time to establish whether they have the financial strength to repay JobKeeper to avoid being potentially named and shamed.

Given that Gerry Harvey will personally receive a $140 million fully franked dividend from Harvey Norman in the coming weeks, the company can clearly afford to repay the full $22 million in JobKeeper it claimed, rather than the $6 million so far. And if his franchisees can’t afford it, Gerry should personally gift them the money.

The Australian’s Robert Gottliebsen was barking up the wrong tree last week when he claimed that any disclosure of JobKeeper recipients with revenues above $10 million would create a hit list for cyber criminals and unions.

If that is the case, why not simply disclose every single recipient rather than shielding those with revenues below $10 million.

Many small entities are already disclosing their JobKeeper revenues and the sky hasn’t fallen in. No one has attacked the Australian Shareholders’ Association for claiming more than $200,000, or the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which wolfed down $5 million while sitting on a $45 million cash pile.

Then you’ve got the various private schools across Australia. Gottliebsen is a director of Penleigh and Essendon Grammar which, as the AFR reported last week, claimed $9.2 million of JobKeeper even though revenue only fell by 2% and it had $24 million of cash in the bank.

Unlike other not-for-profits which only required a 15% revenue drop to qualify, private schools needed to be down by more than 30%.

Private schools collectively claimed well over $1 billion but there has been no media coverage as yet on whether any of them have had second thoughts and decided to pay it back.

If a few headmasters watch 60 Minutes on Sunday night and Frydenberg embraces the public register concept, literally hundreds of millions would rapidly be returned to Australia’s strained coffers.