THE Nationals Victoria leader and Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, says figures just released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Victorians are continuing to lose jobs, while at the same time the rest of Australia has started to recover from the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Walsh said payroll jobs data for the month up to 22 August shows in Victoria those numbers fell a further 2.3 per cent.
But he said in the rest of Australia they rose by 0.1 per cent.
“Overall; since the start of the pandemic in mid-March, payroll jobs have fallen 7.9 per cent in Victoria, compared with 2.9 per cent in the rest of Australia,” Mr Walsh added.
“These figures reveal while Australians in other states are getting back to work, Victorians keep losing their jobs – with no end in sight.
“The Nationals and Liberals have offered proposals and ideas to help deal with the pandemic; have raised them in the Parliament, but they have been ignored by the Andrews Labor Government,” he said.
“Livelihoods have been lost, and are still disappearing down the drain, because of the Andrews Labor Government’s bungled hotel quarantine program and contact tracing shambles, which caused Victoria’s second wave.”
Mr Walsh said while the latest payroll jobs figures show the rest of Australia has started its economic recovery, the news goes from bad to worse for Victorians who have lost their jobs.
“And this is with weeks, and maybe months, left to go in Daniel Andrews’ lockdown – no-one has any sort of target date because the Andrews Labor Government has no clear plan to extricate Victoria from the mess its failures have dumped on it,” he added.
“Only now has the Andrews Labor Government decided to reach out to states such as NSW to try and bolster its bungled and inept contact tracing.”
