Disendorsed Candidate for Clayfield John Meyer’s allegations, printed in the Courier-Mail today, are entirely baseless. We are shocked and saddened by his behaviour and the only question is whether his attacks are the product of confusion or malicious intent. John worked for the Queensland Greens, and was offered multiple opportunities to speak to the Queensland Greens Treasurer to clarify his concerns last month, but he did not take up the chance to do so.
His attempt at garnering more resources for his campaign while threatening the party left the Queensland Campaign Committee no choice but to disendorse him and refute his spurious claims.
As explained to John many times, funds from JobKeeper are paid directly to employees as per the rules set out by the ATO. The conditions for JobKeeper are that each eligible employee must receive at least $1500 per fortnight so long they continue to be employed by the organisation. John was receiving his JobKeeper payments embedded in his fortnightly pay, as do all eligible employees on JobKeeper. We submit our JobKeeper financial reports directly to the ATO monthly and have just completed our biannual audit. There are no anomalies in our accounts or JobKeeper records and they have been submitted to the ECQ.
The Courier-Mail story includes allegations from John that the Qld Greens’ State Director Kitty Carra texted him, asking him to stay silent about JobKeeper. This is not accurate. The actual word was “private”, with Kitty telling John to speak to his line manager as JobKeeper payments pertain to wages and entitlements not available to everyone under the Federal government rules.
John also set up a raffle for his Clayfield campaign, collected prizes, sold tickets himself and the money raised was his to spend on his campaign - he then suddenly raised concerns regarding potential ticket sales to minors and Management Committee members. The raffle was suspended while the party reached out to the Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation to check out his concerns. Two Management Committee members were then refunded their ticket purchases but otherwise, there did not seem to be any issues that we could identify that couldn’t be fixed with a couple of checkboxes on his raffle page. Due to his John’s disendorsement, all raffle tickets have now been refunded.