The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) announced the 594,000 drop in the number of workers in April with the unemployment rate at 6.2 per cent – the highest jobless rate since September 2015.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison remembered the last recession which Australia faced straight after he left university. “It was hard, this is harder,” he said following the press conference in Canberra after the release of the ABS data.
“This is harder – we haven’t seen this before and for young people who have never experienced that, this is beyond anything they could imagine,” he said.
It is believed that the figure would have been higher if not for the federal government’s $130 billion JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, which was designed to keep people in jobs despite the shutdown due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Australia’s Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said that 1.6 million Australians were on the JobSeeker rate while 6 million Australians working for more than 860,000 businesses were on JobKeeper.
He said the joblessness figures were a “painful” effect of the coronavirus pandemic. “This reiterates why our financial commitments to respond to the coronavirus were so important and are so important,” he said.
Both JobSeeker and JobKeeper are scheduled to end in September but could end sooner depending on how the economy looks like in another month.
Mr Morrison said the stimulus plans will be reviewed at the end of June.
At the moment, the jobless rate is the worst it has been since September 1994. The previous largest increase in unemployment in a single month was in October 1982 when joblessness spiked by 65,400.
Across states the joblessness rate increased as follows:
NSW and Victoria – 6 per cent
Queensland – 6.8 per cent
South Australia – 7.2 per cent
Western Australia – 6 per cent
Tasmania – 6.2 per cent
NT – 6 per cent
ACT – 4.2 per cent