Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Hansard green tells me that, when I finished speaking just before the 90-second statements before question time, I was speaking about the JobKeeper supplement, but, before I return to that, looking at the Hansard green prompts me to put on the record how amazing everyone who works in Hansard is. We wouldn't be able to do our jobs the way we do them without their assistance. Given the fact that I can look a few hours later at where I was in my speech, they are absolutely incredible, so I wanted to thank them for everything that they do for all of us.

I want to return to the issue of what we used to call unemployment benefits or Newstart and, in the current trend to put 'job' before everything, we now call JobSeeker. I want to set the scene about how my community in Dunkley has fared in 2020, during the global pandemic, the restrictions and the recession. In June the Grattan Institute produced a report about job losses, and in Dunkley we suffered the third-worst level of job losses in Victoria, with a drop of about eight per cent of jobs since the start of the COVID pandemic. In September the Department of Social Services released the most recent available statistics about people who are on JobSeeker and youth allowance, and in my community in Dunkley from March to July of this year there had been about a 45 per cent increase in people who are now reliant on JobSeeker and about a 51 per cent increase in young people now reliant on youth allowance.

Of course, we all know that in Victoria, in Melbourne and in my community in Dunkley, Frankston and surrounds we've had an extended stage 4 restriction since July, so I am, unfortunately, expecting that these statistics will be worse for us when we see the next lot come out. One of the things that's revealed from the statistics, which, of course, are people, is that it's all areas of our community that have been hit. Frankston South saw a 65 per cent increase in JobSeeker and a 68 per cent increase in youth allowance. Skye and Sandhurst saw a significant jump as well: an almost 60 per cent increase in JobSeeker and a 73 per cent increase in youth allowance. As I said, these aren't just numbers; these are people, often people who have run their own businesses and weren't able to sustain them. Sadly, in terms of youth allowance, a lot of young people who worked at the Peninsula Aquatic Recreation Centre—which the federal government refused to extend JobKeeper to because it was an entity under the local council—didn't get JobKeeper at all, and they were casuals. A lot of these people—

Mr Tim Wilson interjecting—

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