For those coming here from Wednesday’s Crikey article and looking for the big maps, scroll down.

For everyone else, we’ve had a look recently at how the unemployment rates at the regional level have changed since the 2007 election, and how those changes played out in the context of the 2007 Federal election boundaries. Today, as part of a series of demographic articles on the economy I’m doing for Crikey (subscribers only for the first,  today’s seems to be free), we’ll have a squiz at another factor of the GFC impact – the change in government transfer payments by electorate.

If we take Centrelink data from June 2008 and January 2009, we can measure how the number of recipients of Family Tax Benefit Part A & Part B have changed by electorate over the period, as well as how the number of recipients of Newstart Allowance have changed over that time. If we rank the change in each of these Centrelink payment types by electorate from highest to lowest (so that the seat with the lowest increase was ranked 1, while the seat with the highest increase was ranked 150), we’ll have three sets of ranking values for each seat – one for FTB A, one for FTB B and one for Newstart. If we then sum these ranking values for each seat, we get a ranking index that broadly identifies which seats are experiencing the most widespread increase in government transfer payments.

The reason for looking at this comes back to unemployment. While unemployment has increased in most places – particularly the inner cities – because many employers are choosing to reduce the hours of their workforce (and, hence, reducing their workers income) rather than sacking some of their workforce, unemployment doesn’t tell the whole story of what the GFC is doing to the Australian economy on the ground, and where.

The increase in transfer payments however, are at least partly indicative of people that have not only become unemployed (Newstart Allowance), but also those whom have also remained employed but where household income has still been reduced.

As household income reduces, more people fall under the means test for FTB A. Similarly, as people become unemployed or their attachment to the labour market wanes, we would expect to see increases in Family Tax Benefit part B.

What this should tell us is that areas with a high ranking value are far more likely to be experiencing income reductions than those places with a relative low ranking – however, the actual “on the ground reality” of the ranking only applies to low-middle income suburbs (since many people in, say, Warringah wouldn’t qualify for government transfer payments even with a reduction in income).

If we map this ranking from blue (the places with the smallest increase in transfer payments) through to bright red (the places with the largest increase in transfer payments), we get some interesting results.

Worth looking at is Holt in Melbourne and Dickson in Brisbane. Holt, because of it’s relative isolation – an island of transfer increase among a sea of stability – and Dickson because while it was a basketcase during the last recession (or rather, the suburbs that made most of it up at the 2007 election were a basketcase in 1991), this downturn they’re registering increases in transfer payments on par with Liberal heartland seats like Mayo and Menzies…. very very little.

(click to expand all maps)

Brisbane and Sydney

Melbourne and Adelaide

Perth, Qld and Tasmania