As he surveyed the economic wreckage from 6,000 Qantas job cuts this week, the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, expressed the glass-half-full hope that there would be other openings for redundant workers as the sector rebounds.

He quickly added that it would nevertheless be “very, very difficult” for those workers, and in doing so betrayed the size of the problem facing Australia as it grapples with the recessionary fallout from the coronavirus crisis that experts think could ripple through the economy for years.

While the first couple of months of the crisis saw thousands of workers laid off, there was a McCormack-esque expectation that this was a temporary glitch and that, as government support kicked in, most people would make it through the worst and would be back at work soon enough.

A litany of job losses at bluechip companies in the past week show that the damage could be more permanent. Qantas, a flag-carrying totem of Australian enterprise, was just the most visible casualty with its shedding of one-fifth of its employees while keeping another 15,000 stood down. Other big names to feel the pinch were the accountancy giants Deloitte and PwC, which said they would be cutting 700 and 400 positions respectively. The ABC is reducing its workforce by 250 and journalists are also being sacrificed at News Corp.

The Qantas boss Alan Joyce’s prediction that international flights would not resume for another 12 months was a particularly ominous warning for Australia, whose outward-looking economy relies heavily on tourism and overseas students.

The latter, lest it be forgotten, represent the country’s second biggest export earner after iron ore and their likely disappearance thanks to the flights ban has brought some apocalyptic predictions for job losses. The umbrella group Universities Australia reckons there are 21,000 full-time jobs about to be lost in higher education with unions putting it at more like 30,000 academic, managerial and support staff.

Inner city job markets have been the hardest hit so far thanks to the closure of offices and the knock-on effect for small businesses such as cafes and shops. University cuts planned at a number of institutions, including Swinburne and Deakin in Melbourne, will compound the pain. But cuts on the scale feared by the education sector would impact all parts of the country. Central Queensland University for example, which has campuses up and down the state’s seaboard, is pruning 99 roles.

The pain could also spread to the all-powerful resources sector. Chevron, the international oil company, could shed up to 600 jobs with Western Australia in line to be the worst-affected.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this week showed that nearly 300,000 jobs have been lost in the accommodation and food sector, but a steep fall in the so-called participation rate – the number of people in work or actively seeking work – was even more telling, according to Alex Joiner, the chief economist at IFM Investors in Melbourne.

“That was down 3.2 percentage points, which is a huge fall. It’s a low not seen since late 2000. People have dropped out of the jobs market in an almost unprecedented way. They’ve been discouraged and can’t get another job.”

Like many other economists, he believes it is inevitable that the government will have to extend the jobkeeper and jobseeker schemes when they come to an end in September, and then hope that the economy can find its feet.

But the global-facing nature of Australia’s economy suggests that it might not be easy as the virus continues to ravage large parts of the world.

“If it doesn’t recover, the full impact will be felt on consumer spending and even worse, people’s ability to pay their home loans,” he said. “This is where Australia’s high level of household debt is a real vulnerability. If jobkeeper is cut back and the banks less forgiving, then people will be much more vulnerable and cautious. They may well default on their home loan.”

Martin North, of Digital Finance Analytics, agrees that pressure could mount very quickly on household finances, and says that this week’s cuts show that the crisis is now impacting people in better paid jobs who escaped the initial layoffs.

“Many of these are earning way above jobkeeper. So financial pressures are rising,” he says. “This will have a significant impact on confidence and spending patterns as these more affluent workers are bigger spenders and have more disposable income.”

There are some signs that the worst could be over, however, with the closely watched Seek job ads index rising 21% this week. Craig James, the CommSec economist, says Australia had “passed the peak in terms of job losses and is not far off the peak in unemployment”, which he thinks will top out at 8.4%.

Joiner believes it will be at least 11.6%, but Callam Pickering, an economist at the global job site Indeed, also believes Australia is through the worst “provided we can avoid a damaging second wave of Covid-19”.

Even so, he warned that the path to recovery would “leave a long and lingering shadow over the Australian economy” and it is clear the nation’s businesses face a huge challenge.

Joiner said the loss of more than 100,000 migrants in the next 12 months could force a debate about whether Australians would want to welcome back overseas labour if unemployment was still very high.

“It’s a very sensitive and difficult subject, but if we want to erode high unemployment over the next few years we have to talk about how quickly we bring labour back from overseas.”

For others the impact on corporate Australia will be immense and the Qantas job cuts were a sign not just of temporary stress, but a need to restructure some key industries.

Philippe Konfino, transformation lead at EY consultancy, described it as a ripple effect throughout corporate Australia as companies grappled with a seismic change in their business models set off by the crisis.

“The Qantas job cuts are not just about it being in difficulty now, the company is reorganising how it operates in the future. It’s not just Qantas. Covid will change the future of work,” he forecasts.

Some companies had known for some time that up to 40% of their staff could work work from home, but the crisis has accelerated a change that will transform the working lives of thousands of Australians, where they live and the businesses that serve them.

“Covid has meant that companies have been confronted with a reality they already knew about, and the necessity of doing something about it.”