More than 16,580 Bendigo residents made use of the COVID-19 early release of super measures which were available between April and December 2020.

The figures, provided to the Bendigo Advertiser by Industry Super Australia (ISA), show that 3224 accounts held by people in the Bendigo electorate were reduced to negligible amounts during the nine-month period.

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ISA chief executive officer Bernie Dean said the average withdrawal in Bendigo was $7487 under the Covid-19 provisions.

"This is one indication of how people have found it tough during the pandemic,'' he said.

"This (measure) came before Job Keeper and other support measures came in. There are a lot of people now who are expressing to us their resentment that they had to bail themselves out, when we have seen businesses be the beneficiaries of government initiatives."

Mr Dean said superannuation funds delivered between 15 and 20 per cent returns in the past year, outperforming most other investment types.

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The Australian Taxation Office has released figures showing that $37.8 billion of super was approved for early release nationally under the Covid-19 measures to 3.05 million people.

Account holders were able to make two applications - withdrawing as much as $20,000 in separate transactions of up to $10,000 in the 2019-20 financial year and again between 1 July and 31 December 2020.

Mr Dean said young men were quick to seize the opportunity to crack open their nest eggs.

"I do really feel for all of the young people who wiped out their accounts,'' he said.

"We can see from the data that it was mostly young men who wiped out their accounts - reducing them to just a couple of hundred dollars. And they are now missing out on this period of strong returns.

"Young people really need those early savings in order to have good balances when they are ready to retire. It starts off small and grows with the benefit of compound interest.''

The ATO figures show that nationally, more men accessed their super early under the arrangements than women. Of all the approved applications, 2.6 million (56 per cent) were from males and 2 million (44 per cent) were from females. Less then one per cent came from people who didn't specify their gender.

The ATO rejected or cancelled 232,000 applications, amounting to $1.4 billion.

Mr Dean said the regional data for Bendigo was produced by the ISA's specialist economics modelling unit in Canberra, using figures from the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

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