Latest ABS COVID jobs data allows us to update our model

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Pete Faulkner - Cairns, COVID-19, GDP, Jobs, QLD, State Accounts, Townsville, Uncategorized

The ABS released their special bi-weekly jobs data today. It showed jobs falling by 6.9% in the month from 21st March in Australia; the decline was 6.1% in Queensland.

The breakdown by industry showed;

Accommodation & Food down 30.9%/27.9% (Aus/Qld)
Arts & Recreation down 11.8%/11.2%
Retail down 6.0%/6.1%
Construction down 6.1%/5.2%
Agriculture down 10.3%/5.9%

While Healthcare was down 3.2% across the nation (impacts of elective surgeries being suspended?) it was up 1.7% in Queensland.

Plugging the insights from this new data into our model provides the following results. As you can see, it shows Cairns unemployment rate hitting 15.4% as a top (better than many due to our lower starting point) but staying elevated for much longer (still 11.7% by year end) and Gross Regional Product falling by 7.3% in 2020.

We are now expecting Queensland unemployment to get as high as 14.3% before falling to 9.1% by the end of the year with Gross State Product declining 5.4% over 2020.

The actual Labour Force data for April will be released on May 14th and then the regional data a week later on May 21st; at which time we will be relaesing our Conus/CBC Staff Selection Regional Employment Trend data and updating this model once again.