Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

As the chamber would be aware, COVID-19 has been an economic and health crisis unprecedented in the last century. In Australia, we took early and comprehensive measures, of course, to stabilise our economy in the face of lockdowns, and the enormous health uncertainty that we were faced with earlier this year.

The JobKeeper program, which is actually Australia's largest wage subsidy program, has been critical to keeping so many Australians in jobs, and building the foundation of what is now our economic recovery. Encouragingly, with the economic recovery now underway, we are seeing fewer businesses in need of JobKeeper. In October, with the labour force figures coming out, over the last five months we've seen around 650,000 jobs return to the labour market. This includes almost 344,000 jobs for women and around 226,600 jobs for young Australians.