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The Conus Trend series for Cairns SA4 building approvals fell to 96 in May, down 21.6% year-on-year and the lowest monthly reading since November 2024. Last month’s April read has also been revised, down to 101 from the 104 first reported. As flagged previously, the series is still working through …read more
The latest ABS Monthly Household Spending Indicator (May 2026) confirms a milestone worth pausing on. Discretionary spending growth crossed above non-discretionary in March, the first time that has happened in this cost-of-living cycle, and the gap has widened in each month since. By May, Trend discretionary spending was up 5.2% …read more
Cairns Regional Council adopted its 2026/27 budget on 17 June, and for the median residential ratepayer the headline is a total bill increase of around 7.5%, or roughly $283 a year. General property rates themselves rise a more modest 3.95%; the gap between the two is water, waste, and the …read more
The raw figures for May looked soft. Total passenger movements through Cairns Airport came in at 376,582, down 2.8 per cent on May last year. But the headline does the underlying trend a disservice. Our seasonally adjusted and Trend work tells a more encouraging story: the Conus Trend for total …read more
In this blog we decompose population growth in the Cairns Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4) into its three drivers (natural increase, net internal migration and net overseas migration) over the eight years to 2024-25. The aim is to establish how the region’s growth is actually generated, and how that composition …read more
The ABS have just released population data to the end of 2025. This post takes a look at Queensland’s population growth over the past four decades. The data tells a clear structural story, and the interesting part is in the composition rather than the headline. Averaged by financial year, the …read more
The Reserve Bank held the cash rate at 4.35% yesterday in a unanimous 9-0 decision, up from the 8-1 split we saw in May. The shift to consensus signals that the Board has aligned around a “wait and see” approach; three hikes in the books, now assessing whether they’ve done …read more
The Crisafulli Government released the tender for the head contractor of the Cairns Hospital Expansion on 11 June, advancing a $1 billion-plus program expected to generate around 3,800 construction jobs for Cairns and Far North Queensland. Funded through the fully-funded Hospital Rescue Plan, the project is described by the government …read more
On 12 June, a frontier AI model that businesses had only just begun building into their workflows simply disappeared, not because its maker chose to retire it, but because a foreign government ordered it switched off. It is a small story with a large lesson about how we now depend …read more
The Conus Trend series for April comes in at 104, down 11.4% year-on-year and the lowest reading since January 2025. That number is not the story this month. The Trend is still absorbing the 468 Woree unit approvals from July 2025, and the unadjusted series is being dragged lower by …read more
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series