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Yesterday saw the ABS release short term arrivals and departures data for the month of Feb. Following the release we read plenty of, frankly breathless, commentary about the strength of the Chinese visitor data…most usually when people referred to the highly volatile original, non-adjusted data. When looking at data for Chinese visitors this can be a dangerous thing to do in light of the rather fluid dates for Chinese New Year (CNY). So let’s take a moment to reflect on what the data actually tells us.
Putting aside the original data, if we look at the seasonally adjusted series we see that total short-term visitors in Feb rose 3.9% from the same month a year earlier and summing for the past 12 months they were up by 6.6%. Healthy increases to be sure.
Looking at the Chinese data is rather more difficult. Chinese New Year was in late January in 2017 and in mid-February in 2018 so making direct comparisons would be problematic. The ABS seasonal adjustment of the original data appears to struggle with adjusting for the highly fluid date of CNY (despite recent changes to methodology) and showed February up 14.5% from the same period a year ago and up 12.5% for the 12 months…again, strong data. However, we should perhaps reflect that this is the slowest pace of annual growth in 6 months.
Given the issues around CNY we much prefer the less dramatic Trend series when considering Chinese visitations. This showed Feb with a 6.9% year on year increase, which is the slowest pace of year on year growth since February 2010! The annual Trend data reveals a 12.8% increase; similar to the relatively slow pace of growth we’ve seen for the past 6 months.
Make no mistake, Chinese visitor numbers into Australia are running at record highs. But let’s not get too carried away to realise that the pace of growth has slowed sharply in recent months (see chart above). Data from the months following this year’s CNY will certainly help to clarify the likely longer term Trend. China of course is not the only show in town (accounting for not quite 16% of total arrivals for the year) and we have seen solid growth from other core, and growing, markets such as USA (+10.4% y/y) and India (+19.3%).
However, when we consider the data for the state of intended stay the picture confirms the ongoing under-performance of Queensland. This data is presented by the ABS only in its unadjusted, original format so we prefer to use the Conus Trend series. Here we see that Queensland was the only state or territory that saw a decline in numbers over the year, down 1.0% from a year ago. Monthly Trend data has now fallen in Queensland for each of the last 6 months with the Trend annual totals (original ABS data) virtually at a standstill.
As we have been saying for a long time, Queensland is struggling to keep up with other states in terms of its attractiveness to international visitors. This has been demonstrated by the Tourism Research Australia International Visitors Survey over many quarters (see commentary here) and today’s ABS data merely confirms it. Victoria took over second spot from Queensland back in early 2014 and the gap between the two has widen significantly ever since.
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series