Two million Aussies still jobless as Victoria’s crippling lockdown rolls on

Almost one in ten Australians remained jobless in September, despite most of the economy outside Victoria starting to open up. And while the data is trending downwards, one expert says it may actually be bad news for the country’s post-virus recovery.

Nearly two million Australians were still jobless in September — despite most of the economy outside Victoria starting to open up.

The latest Roy Morgan employment data showed that the national jobless total fell by 152,000 in September — with all of that taking place outside Victoria and with NSW and South Australia doing best.

But Michelle Levine, chief of Roy Morgan, stated that the drop in the headline jobless rate from 13.8 per cent to 12.9 per cent was not good news because it came entirely from people who had given up looking for work.

In September there were actually 56,000 fewer jobs in the country than in August. Further, on top of the 1.83 million logged as jobless by Roy Morgan, another 1.33 million Australians were underemployed, working part-time and looking for more work.

That meant more than 3.3 million Australians were still jobless or underemployed — nearly one in every four workers and only a slight improvement on August’s figures.

Critically, the jobless numbers don’t include the three million-plus workers across Australia who are still officially in jobs because of JobKeeper.

But as Ms Levine warned, both JobKeeper and JobSeeker were reduced at the end of September, with the JobKeeper wage subsidy for full-time workers lowered by $300 to $1200 a fortnight and cut in half to $750 a fortnight for part-time workers.

Hundreds of jobless Aussies lined up outside Centrelink when the pandemic first hit in March Picture: Sam Ruttyn

This is now forcing businesses that had relied on these payments to stay alive to “assess how many of their employees are vital to the business and which now may be too costly to continue to employ,” she added.

Ms Levine pointed out that the two states that had most opened up — NSW and South Australia — had recorded the biggest falls in their jobless rates, to about 11 per cent; Victoria was unchanged at about 12 per cent, while Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania were all about 15 per cent.

The Morgan jobless rate of 12.9 per cent is nearly double the official 6.8 per cent figure from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

But nobody — not even the ABS itself — regards the ABS number as meaningful, as it doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work.

It’s also way out of date, covering just the first two weeks of August, while the Morgan data is for September.

These numbers provide a sombre lead-in to Tuesday’s Budget, where Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is expected to unveil a gigantic budget deficit of at least $200bn as he embarks on a massive spending spree.

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Originally published as Two million Aussies still jobless as Victoria’s crippling lockdown rolls on