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 their June estimates having just been released.
REMPLAN 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 that have made applications to receive payments under JobKeeper as at 31 July 2020. This analysis has then been incorporated into an interactive and themed map located here where you can search for an LGA of interest or browse the map to find a particular region. For REMPLAN clients, there are also direct links to the map interface in the software.
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