Page 2920 - Week 10 - Thursday, 7 October 2021
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build resilience and support recovery from COVID-19 that is inclusive of social impacts as well as health.
The global experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its health and economic impacts, would suggest that it has not created social inequality but it has been merciless in exposing those inequities. Numerous studies from people like Michael Marmot at University College London have demonstrated beyond all reasonable critique that social and economic determinants play a vital role in health outcomes.
The circumstances of people’s lives have a direct correlation with the outcomes they achieve. Whether someone has safe, secure, affordable and appropriate housing, has food on the table, and has enough money to pay for life’s essentials is a strong indicator of the outcomes they will experience. It is these people already at risk who have disproportionately been impacted by the pandemic, both in health outcomes and in economic costs.
Between August 2018 and August 2021, the underutilisation rate—which combines unemployment and underemployment—for ACT men has risen from 9.4 per cent to 11.1 per cent and for ACT women from 10.8 per cent to 11.7 per cent. Full-time jobs for women continue to be replaced by part-time jobs with not as many hours as needed—a trend that reached a turning point in September 1991 in the ACT and a key contributor to women’s underemployment. I note that the same trend reached a turning point for ACT men in April 2019.
I also note who is not counted in our unemployment rate. In August 2021 in the ACT, 2.4 per cent of the labour force were employed but worked zero hours because there was no work available for them—the result of the pandemic economic impacts plus zero-hours contracts in hospitality, retail, tourism, and the arts. This is also why we have seen a drop in labour force participation rates, most notably for women, who have disproportionately taken on supporting home schooling for children and care for older Canberrans or family members with disability at the cost of their career. After dropping to 65.4 per cent in May 2020 during the first lockdown in Canberra, the ACT women’s labour force participation rate bounced back to 71.9 per cent in October 2020, but has now dropped again, to 66.4 per cent in August 2021.
I expect all these statistics will be worse in the 16 October ABS labour force data release as we see the result of the current economic impacts of the pandemic in the ACT as well as the reduction in commonwealth income support. We knew back in February that the Morrison government’s ending of the JobSeeker supplement would result in another 20,000 Canberrans living in poverty. We asked them not to do this. Now it has happened, and we are seeing the impacts on households with the least resources to manage the ongoing impacts of COVID-19.
Recent ACT government YourSay survey results show that 36 per cent of young people have experienced loss of income and 80 per cent are more socially isolated. Some 43 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds and 66 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds rated their mental health as fair or poor. This reflects the fact that young people experience greater loss of paid work as a result of the impacts on hospitality, retail and the arts, where so many young people work.
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