Hardship, distress, and resilience: The initial impacts of COVID-19 in Australia

Countries around the world are taking steps to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, balancing the need to save lives with the economic and social dislocation caused by physical distancing and isolation measures. In Australia, significant measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 were initiated in early February with the first travel restrictions. Following that, widespread physical distancing and isolation measures were progressively implemented from mid-March.

Monitoring and understanding the economic, health and social impacts of COVID-19 and the associated social policy response is vital for informing governments’ decisions about the measures that are being taken. It can help shed light on how long to keep measures in place, and the policies and programs that are needed to reduce the negative impacts. The spread of COVID-19 is also changing the nature of the relationship between citizens and government, at least in the short-term.

This paper provides a summary of the impact of COVID-19 on labour market outcomes, income, financial stress, social cohesiveness, political attitudes, subjective wellbeing, and psychological distress. It is based on data from the 33rd ANUpoll which collected information from 3,155 Australians over the period 14-27 April 2020. It is the first longitudinal survey data on the impact of COVID-19 with respondents to the April ANUpoll also interviewed in January and February 2020. This means it is possible to not only estimate change in outcomes from prior to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to understand what individual characteristics are associated with doing better or worse during the pandemic. Furthermore, the relatively large number of respondents compared to most other surveys collected after COVID-19 allows the data to be broken down into different population groups and geographic regions.

In addition to being nationally representative, when benchmarked against official data the rate of COVID-19 testing estimated using the ANUpoll data is very close to the official rate.