Small Area Labour Market data for the North

The Dept of Employment have released their Small Area Labour Market data for the December quarter. The headline data is presented as a smoothed 4 quarters average at both Local Govt Area and SA2 level. However, hidden in the release is the original, unsmoothed, data and from that we create the Conus Trend …read more

International Visitors Survey shows TNQ falling further behind

The (delayed) release of the Dec 2018 International Visitor Survey from TRA (available here) shows the Tropical North falling further behind the nation and State. Nationwide international visitor numbers increased by 4.8% y/y for the year to Dec 2018 with expenditure up 8.0% y/y. The visitor gains in Queensland were …read more

Trend data shows another strong month for Cairns

The release of ABS regional labour force data for Feb allows us to update our own Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend series; and it shows us a very strong picture emerging in Cairns. Last month we saw some unbelievably low unemployment data in the original data-set from the ABS for Cairns …read more

Far North population growth lags QLD average. Townsville losing out

The ABS today released their population estimates for June 30th 2018 for regional areas. Within our region the Local Government Areas have all fared worse that the state average. Of particular interest is the fact that Townsville’s growth came in at just 0.6% for the year (down from +0.9% in …read more

Queensland labour market showing signs of improvement

Yesterday’s release of the Feb Labour Force data from the ABS seemed to suggest that, just as the growth in Australian jobs appears to have stabilised, there might finally be some better news for Queensland. The national data showed an additional 4,600 (seasonally adjusted) were added to the number employed …read more

Arrivals and Departures data; tourism still on the up and up

The Short Term Arrivals and Departures data for January from the ABS show tourism into Australia still growing strongly. Short Term Arrivals lifted 3.2% y/y (Trend) and even excluding Chinese arrivals, which were up 6.4% y/y, was up 2.6% y/y. Accounting for the last 12 months Trend data showed a …read more

How female participation has effected QLD’s regions

A few weeks ago we wrote a post on some work we had done breaking down changes in Participation Rates in QLD regions to discover the impact that changes to the age profile of the working population had (you can read that here). That post attracted some interest and one …read more

Labour Account is a treasure trove of labour data

Today’s release of the December 2018 Labour Account data series provides a wealth of data. One thing it allows us to do is take a  look at incomes across various industry sectors and how they have changed in the past 12 months. The table below shows, for selected industries, the …read more

Regional building approvals fall again

The release by the ABS of the January, original regional residential building approvals allows us to update our own Conus Trend series. With residential approvals falling sharply at both the national and state level (see here for commentary) it is no surprise to see the decline across the regions. On …read more

What is a “per capita recession”? Are we in one? And does it matter?

Last week we saw a weak set of National Accounts for the final quarter of 2018 which showed growth of just 0.2% q/q, 2.3% y/y and 2.8% 12 month average (commentary here). As this data was released we also started seeing a lot of talk (primarily on Twitter initially before …read more

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