This analysis of essential workers brings a spatial perspective to urban policy to address social and spatial inequalities. It identifies the home location of essential workers, and the likely percentage of essential workers by small area (SA2) that may also need to travel to perform their work. This is based on government essential worker definitions¹ assumptions regarding workers ability to work from home and 2016 ABS Census resident worker by industry data.

The spatial patterns of essential workers across Australian capital cities are clear.

In Sydney, most essential workers live and work in the south-west and western Sydney. In Melbourne, the highest proportion of essential workers are in the north and west growth areas on the city's outer edges. In both Sydney and Melbourne, these are also the locations where the highest number of infections were recorded during the outbreaks of the COVID-19 Delta variant in mid to late 2021.

Essential workplaces quickly became locations of high COVID-19 transmission and have experienced the largest outbreaks. These are the workers that have been living with COVID-19 from the outset. It is these groups, and their households, that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

The pandemic has further exposed the underlying inequalities across the cities.

These are also the locations in our cities with less developed social connectors that support the creation and sharing of social capital. Social connectors are explored in a report by CRED for Greater Sydney Commission that highlights the older, more established locations with higher levels of social connectors that can contribute to increased sharing of social capital. The pandemic has further exposed the underlying inequalities across the cities.

Locations with higher proportions of essential workers are also those locations that were developed in a less compact way, with social infrastructure, open space, transport, and other social connectors being built further distances from homes, and provision of social infrastructure not necessarily matching the level of population growth, making it harder for the sharing of social capital.

These are also the locations that have higher numbers of people living in each household and lower numbers of general practitioners.

Other cities can learn from the experience in Sydney and Melbourne

There is an opportunity for other Australian cities – Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart – to learn from the experience in Sydney and Melbourne with the highest levels of COVID-19 infections in essential workplaces and homes of essential workers. There are clear lessons for prioritising workplace safety, including focusing vaccine rollouts on essential workers and providing access to health services in locations near where essential workers live and/or work. The initial mapping and analysis provided shows that:

• Suburbs in and around Adelaide’s northern LGAs of Playford and Salisbury have an oversized share of service sector workers, while in the outer south, parts of central Onkaparinga (in the vicinity of Noarlunga Centre) are also overrepresented by these workers. At the other end of the spectrum, the share of essential workers in the relatively socio-economically advantaged inner eastern and inner southern suburbs is relatively low.
• In Greater Perth, essential workers are more densely located in the outer growth suburbs such as Armadale and Gosnells in the southeast, Baldivis in the south, Ellenbrook in the northeast and Two Rocks to the northwest. The wealthier western and river suburbs had the lowest shares of essential workers.
• Greater Brisbane has a higher proportion of essential workers across the city’s southern fringe, particularly in Logan, Ipswich and the emerging Ripley Valley. Most noteworthy are the Logan suburbs of Kingston, Marsden and Crestmead. To Brisbane’s north, there are large proportions of essential workers stretching from Strathpine, through the Bayside suburbs and up to as far as Maroochydore and Nambour in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
• In the ACT, excluding areas with very low population numbers such as Fyshwick and Namadgi, the area with the greatest share of essential workers is Duntroon, due to the Defence and Army presence there. Elsewhere in Canberra, essential workers had the highest concentration in the suburbs in Tuggeranong and central Woden around the Canberra Hospital and Department of Health.
• Greater Hobart has a higher proportion of essential workers in northern suburbs and towns in particular around the Derwent Valley but also extending through the Southern Midlands down the eastern edge of the Derwent River to Risdon Vale. This includes suburbs around the northern end of the Derwent River such as New Norfolk, Brighton, Rokeby and Risdon Vale which includes the Risdon Prison Complex. These are areas of the most relative socio-economic disadvantage compared to the Hobart City Centre are and inner areas such as Sandy Bay, Battery Point, North Hobart and South Hobart.