Dept of Employment SALM data confirms the improvement in the North

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Pete Faulkner - Cairns, Jobs, Townsville, Uncategorized

After yesterday’s ABS regional jobs data (see here) showed continued improvement in the labour force measures in the Cairns and Townsville SA4 areas, today we get the Dept of Employment’s, much awaited, quarterly Small Area Labour Market (SALM) data for the second quarter which allows us to consider data at the local government area level.

The SALM estimates are created using data from Centrelink of people in receipt of Newstart and Youth Allowance by postcode, the ABS regional labour market data at SA4 level and the Census labour force data at SA2 level. These data sets are used to create the SALM estimations using a methodology called Structure Preserving Estimation (SPREE). Due to the highly volatile nature of this data the Dept presents the data on a smoothed 4 quarters moving average basis for Local Government Areas. This creates a very lagged measure so we have utilised the original, un-smoothed data (which is hidden away on the Dept website) to create a Conus Trend series for our local LGA regions.

This shows Trend SALM unemployment rates at 6.3% (unchanged from March) for Cairns Regional Council, a rate of 6.6% (down from 6.7% in March) for the Cassowary Coast Regional Council area and 8.2% (down from 9.1% in March) for the Townsville City Council area.

The Conus Trend analysis of the derived SALM employment data shows Cairns Regional Council area adding 5,900 employed for the year to June 2017, Cassowary Coast Regional Council area added 880 and Townsville City Council area added 5,600.

Note: Given the different methodologies used to calculate the two different series, comparisons between the SALM and ABS Labour Force data (and the derived Conus Trend data) need to be treated with caution.