06 Aug JobKeeper Hotspot Analysis and Mapping

The Australian Government’s JobKeeper initiative has been one of its key responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to support businesses and retain jobs.  The initial scheme was due to come to an end in September but as we have seen, the economy is still in crisis mode and payments have been extended until March 2021.

REMPLAN has been undertaking modelling to estimate the economic impact of the pandemic on regions across Australia with our June estimates having just been released and we will be publishing a blog shortly in this regard.

We have found that for some industries the negative implications for employment are broadly proportionate to the changes in revenue.  In other sectors however, most jobs are being retained despite reduced income and this is due, in part, to government assistance programs such as JobKeeper.

Each region of Australia has a unique industry profile and therefore will be reliant to a greater or lesser degree on the JobKeeper program.  REMPLAN has used the postcode-based data released by the Australian Government to estimate the proportion of businesses in each Local Government Area (LGA) and SA2 that have made applications to receive payments under JobKeeper as at 30 May 2020. This analysis has then been incorporated into an interactive and themed map located here where you can search for an LGA or SA2 of interest or browse the map to find a particular region.

The analysis has identified Byron Shire in New South Wales as the LGA having the highest proportion of businesses having applied to JobKeeper (64%) closely followed by Shark Bay in Western Australia at 63% and Douglas in Queensland with 62%.  The economies of these areas are of course heavily reliant on tourism activity which has been severely impacted by travel restrictions.

At the other end of the scale, there is one LGA that has no applications for JobKeeper which is Bulloo in Queensland and generally most of those LGAs recording lower percentages are in rural areas.

The chart below shows the percentage of businesses in each of the nation’s eight capital cities that have applied for JobKeeper payments.  Hobart has the highest proportion at 39.2% with Adelaide the lowest at 23.6%, similar to Perth at 24.7%.  Melbourne and Sydney are virtually the same at around 30%.

Please contact the REMPLAN team if you have any questions on this JobKeeper analysis or would like to discuss how we can help you with your economic or demographic analysis matter more generally.

Let’s talk:     1300 737 443

Kind regards

The REMPLAN team