Corporate welfare cheats: the real bludgers in Australian society

While Australia’s poor and marginalised are portrayed as “welfare cheats” by the LNP and right wing, the real welfare cheats are pocketing billions at the expense of the Australian taxpayer.

These are the large corporations, particularly their CEOs and executives, who receive handouts from the government that they don’t really need and are not really entitled to.

They are not the poor and the disenfranchised of Australian society. They are not struggling to survive like millions of Australians in need.

The LNP under John Howard changed the narrative of social security payments as being welfare, a pejorative term adopted to America to demonise and marginalise those receiving government benefits.

The connotations of the word welfare are generally perceived as negative, and is not how Australia’s social security scheme was originally envisaged.

All benefits paid by Centrelink should be classified as just that: benefits. Even social security payment or entitlements is far more accurate of how these payments were originally perceived by the government royal commission back in 1905-07.

Yet today, the recipients of this money are placed under constant scrutiny and attack by the government, with over one thousand sections the two social security acts designed to deny payments, and Centrelink constantly dreaming up new policies to claw back money already legally paid to people.

The most infamous of these was Robodebt, where the government illegally used income averaging to raise debts on over 400,000 people, leading to an estimated 2,000 suicides of vulnerable Australians.

Contrast this to the JobKeeper payments to corporate Australia. When this legislation was first introduced, the LNP government of the day promised that any money overpaid to employers would have to be repaid, yet there seems to be no documented cases of this actually happening.

Indeed, the government later backflipped and said the money wouldn’t need to be repaid. If Centrelink recipients have to repay overpayments, why not corporate Australia?

Consider also the case of QANTAS back in 2020, who laid off 9,000 employees and were rewarded by the government with billions of dollars in handouts. Little of this benefitted the sacked employees, but you can bet that a lot went into the pockets of their CEO, executives and shareholders.

Harvey Norman and Virgin were other companies that benefitted from JobKeeper, along with thousands of others.

The solution is simple. The Labor government has to undo these wrongs, and pass legislation to get the money returned.

This money would be better spent on the real victims of the economic downturn and rising unemployment – everyday Australians.

It’s time to stop this corporate theft.