page_title: COVID-19 pandemic in Australia
section_title: Economic
hierarchical_section_title: COVID-19 pandemic in Australia / Impacts / Economic
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Street during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brisbane, Australia
context_page_description: The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia began on 25 January 2020, in Victoria. A man who had returned from Wuhan, China, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
  The Australian government stopped all non-residents from entering the country on 20 March. Social distancing rules were put in place on 21 March. The state governments closed "non-essential" services. This included social gathering places such as hotels and clubs, but not businesses such as construction, manufacturing and many retail stores.
  The number of new cases grew sharply, until reaching about 350 per day on 22 March. The numbers stayed around 350, and then started falling at the beginning of April. At the end of April it was under 20 cases per day. As of 19 May 2020, there were 7,068 cases and 99 deaths in Australia.
context_section_description: On 3 March, the Reserve Bank of Australia became the first central bank to cut interest rates in response to the outbreak. They were cut to a record low of 0.5%.
  On 12 March, the Government said it would spend A$17.6 billion to help the economy. It included a one-off A$750 payment to around 6.5 million people who already received income help from the government , small business assistance with 700,000 grants up to $25,000 and to pay 50% of the wages for 120,000 apprenticies or trainees for up to 9 months, 1 billion to support economically impacted sectors, regions and communities, and $700 million to increase tax write off and $3.2 billion to support short-term small and medium-sized business investment.
  On 19 March, the Reserve Bank again cut interest rates again to 0.25%, the lowest in Australian history.
  In March 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed how the virus was affecting the economy. Retail sales had increased by 0.4% in February 2020. This was probably because of increased sales at supermarkets where people were buying extra supplies in case they were put into isolation.  Businesses that relied on tourism lost most of their sales.
  On 22 March, the government announced a second amount of A$66bn, bringing the amount to A$89bn. They doubled income support and made it easier to get the Jobseeker's allowance. They gave up to A$100,000 to small and medium-sized businesses and A$715 million to Australian airports and airlines. People were allowed to access up to A$10,000 of their superannuation in 2019–2020 and again for the next year.
  On 30 March, the Australian Government said they would spend $130 billion on the "JobKeeper" program. This would pay employers up to $1500 a fortnight for workers that had been in that business for over a year. The business had to have lost 30% of their turnover. For businesses who had made more than $1 billion, their turnover must have dropped by 50%. Businesses pay the Jobseeker money to their staff, instead of their usual wages. This program was to deal with the enormous job losses seen one week before, when about one million Australians lost their jobs. This massive loss in jobs caused the Australian Government's myGov website to crash and lines of people waiting to enter Centrelink offices were hundreds of metres long. The program was backdated to 1 March, to help re-employ the many people who had just lost their jobs in the weeks before. Businesses would receive the JobKeeper money for six months.
  In the first hour of the scheme, over 8,000 businesses applied for the payments. The JobKeeper program is one of the largest economic packages in the history of Australia.
caption: An empty street in Brisbane, 29 March 2020.
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