If the size of the crisis determines the size of the opportunity, the coronavirus pandemic and the recession it drove have given Tasmania plenty to consider.

Immigration is pretty much dead, for now at least, so the supply of imported workers and, particularly, new residents can be expected to slow significantly.

At the same time, many Tasmanians have been thrown out of work and are looking for opportunities.

Demographer Lisa Denny sees big opportunities there, but does not believe it will just happen.

Rather, she sees the crisis as an opportunity to boost and broaden economic recovery through industry policy going "hand in hand" with education and training policy, to not only help more Tasmanians into work, but to create better and more secure jobs.

There are also lessons from the past - and this might become the worst downturn since the Great Depression - and the present to consider.

As former financial advisor and current Liberal MHA Joan Rylah sees it, community resilience is an advantage and renewable energy is a huge opportunity for the state.

A few numbers for starters:

The jobs recovery, when it comes, is expected to vary between the different sectors, with tourism and accommodation especially hard hit by movement restrictions and a pause in international travel expected to last for months yet.

Mrs Rylah spent 28 years as a financial adviser before being elected in Braddon in 2014.

In that time, she absorbed lessons from events including the Global Financial Crisis, Australia's most recent recession in 1991 and Tasmania's ups and downs.

"We all need to remember the recoveries are always longer and stronger than downturns, but recoveries are not smooth," Mrs Rylah said.

"The situation in Victoria is a reminder of that."

Mrs Rylah said the GFC was a financial crisis and coronavirus a health issue, so different sectors had been hurt badly.

Health, tourism, hospitality and small retail had been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, while transport, big box retail and agriculture had been among those to stay strong.

"The key difference is we've had better targeted stimulus by the federal and the state governments," she said.

Mrs Rylah said the GFC and coronavirus were both external shocks.

"We learned a lot from the GFC and previous external shocks," she said.

She said one key lesson was how well Australia did by immediately easing monetary policy (slashing interest rates) as the GFC loomed.

Interest rates were at record lows for some time before the pandemic.

"The second thing we learned in Tasmania is that if you can start with a strong balance sheet, you are in such a strong position," she said.

"Our difference is we had rebuilt a stronger financial position with high confidence and zero net debt, so we were ready to deal with an external shock."

She said it was important not to panic in such situations, but to react quickly and robustly and "manage the smaller perspectives of what's happening locally".

"The challenge we've got is you can't spend all your pennies," Mrs Rylah said.

"You have to have stimulus to get confidence back in the economy and we are certainly doing that in massive amounts."

However, she said, spending every available dollar at once would not be wise because it was not certain how long the crisis would last.

"With Spanish flu, it took two years to come out of the emergency," she said.

"One would hope we can do better than that, but it's a long game.

"We've got to keep stimulus going in different forms."

Mrs Rylah said the eventual winding back of stimulus would be difficult.

"We don't know how long (the crisis) is going to be for," she said.

"We acted decisively, we acted quickly and we put in massive stimulus, but COVID has disrupted not only our economy, but Australia's economy and the world's economy."

She said Tasmania was export driven and export markets would have challenges for some time.

"The next real opportunity I see is energy," Mrs Rylah said.

"Hydrogen, Marinus, wind farm developments and pumped hydro are such huge opportunities and the timing of it couldn't be better for us.

"It's the future for Tasmania's income."

Mrs Rylah said strong companies and strong states tended to do well in recessions.

"We clearly are a strong state relative to other Australian states because of the work we've done," she said.

"We're strong and ready to surge ahead, I believe."

Population growth has been a major contributor to Tasmania's relatively strong economic performance in recent years, but that is expected to change due to movement restrictions and, especially, the pandemic's dampening effect on immigration.

Demographer Lisa Denny expects overseas migration movements to largely stop in the short term, and interstate migration movements to decline considerably.

She said what would happen after the pandemic was anybody's guess.

" ... population change is the cumulative sum of individual decisions: where to live and whether to have children and how many to have," Dr Denny said.

"That decision is based on a whole range of factors, each of which has a different level of importance and value for individuals/couples/families, each of them linked to opportunities, lifestyle choices, policy settings.

"How people are thinking about where they want to live and whether their values and priorities have changed as a result of COVID-19 is yet to be seen.

"Has Australia or Tasmania been affected enough to instigate big changes?

"Or perhaps bushfires and climate change will affect the decision making process more?

"Or perhaps people have lost their incomes and don't have that choice any more?"

"What is clear is that as the economy recovers and some industry sectors start to grow again, it is unlikely that emerging skill shortages will be solved through migration means," Dr Denny said.

"Not only will strong, and necessary, border controls be restrictive for population movements, they will most likely be ongoing until a vaccine can be accessed by the whole population."

She said the economy would recover and restructure.

"Some industries will become stronger, earlier, like the healthcare and social assistance sector, which will require many more trained and skilled workers over the years to come, and the agriculture sector, as food security remains critically important."

She said other industries would take far longer to recover, and might not recover to pre-crisis levels.

"For the tourism sector, a lack of financial means and confidence to travel will likely impact the sector for some time to come," she said.

Dr Denny said the crisis had revealed how polarised and inequitable Tasmania's employment market had been

"Not only has the pandemic exposed the vulnerability of the industry structure of our economy and the precarious nature of employment for so many, it has also highlighted the importance of the work carried out by so many Tasmanians whose industry and jobs have previously been undervalued: namely the healthcare and social assistance sector, educators, child carers, cleaners and many public servants," she said.

"The recovery process provides the opportunity to correct the structural economic and social deficiencies that exist in our labour market.

"Policy needs to move beyond just creating jobs, but to creating good jobs which offer quality work in a good working environment."

She said the workforce before the crisis was polarised between high skill and low skill jobs.

"Almost half the workforce (47.1 per cent) required no formal qualification higher than a certificate II, while less than a third (29.7 per cent) required a bachelor degree or higher to undertake their job," Dr Denny said.

"Over time, Tasmania's workforce was becoming further polarised, with the proportion requiring a certificate III or IV qualification (a trade ticket) declining to 12.6 per cent of the workforce compared with 16.6 per cent in 2016."

She said the workforce had been dominated by "gendered" industries and occupation clusters, with five industry sectors making up more than half of the workforce.

They were healthcare and social assistance, education and training, retail, accommodation and food services and construction.

"More and more people in the workforce were also in casual roles: that is, roles with flexibility, but usually without job security and the protections of sick, carer and holiday pay," Dr Denny said.

"The roles most likely to be casualised, underemployed and working more than one job are those also in lower skill level jobs with low pay: precisely those roles that involve face to face and hands-on contact, care and support for customers, clients, patients and other vulnerable people.

"The economic component of the post COVID-19 recovery must not be considered in isolation of the social component.

"Efforts to create jobs must focus not just on higher skilled jobs, but also on quality jobs: those which provide enough hours of work, with security of income, access to paid sick and carers leave, the opportunity for career progression and intrinsic job quality.

"To do this, economic policy must be shaped by industry policy.

"More secure work and quality working environments are better for the economy as well as the health and wellbeing of Tasmanians.

"Economic recovery, in the form of industry policy, must go hand-in-hand with education and training policy, and it now must look within our island state to find and train our future workforce.

"By having a proactive, yet wide, lens, the structural deficiencies which also occurred alongside the economic recovery post the GFC should also be averted to achieve inclusive growth."

Economist Saul Eslake said the overall message from the job figures and separate ABS job figures based on payrolls was that Tasmania's labour force had fared less well than that of the rest of Australia during the shutdown.

"This is consistent with the history of previous national economic downturns, which have seen Tasmania's economy hit harder than national averages irrespective of how well Tasmania had been doing beforehand," Mr Eslake said.

"Tasmania's weaker labour market performance during the shutdown also no doubt reflects the fact that a larger proportion of Tasmania's pre-crisis workforce was employed in industries that have been disproportionately affected by the shutdown, in particular tourism ...

"... the North-West Coast also experienced a stricter lock-down than the rest of Australia for three weeks after the outbreak at the NWRH, which may have had some impact on Tasmania's measured labour market performance."

The state and federal governments have both rolled out massive stimulus packages to fight the downturn, with the potential of more to come.

Income support has been the key federal measure, while the state has focused heavily on infrastructure.

Premier Peter Gutwein said the plan to keep Tasmanians safe from the virus had worked and had saved lives.

He said the success allowed the state to start opening up the economy weeks ahead of schedule.

Tasmanian Labor Leader Rebecca White sees the recovery period as an opportunity to make Tasmania "fairer" and better.

She said the crisis had underlined the insecure nature of many Tasmanian jobs and more secure jobs must be a goal in the recovery period.

She said a quarter of Tasmanians lived below the poverty line even before the crisis.