International Visitor Survey for Q4 delayed until June/July

The ABS has been having issues with the reporting of short term overseas arrivals and departures (OAD) data since the Sept 2014 released back in November last year. The problem has been caused “due to passenger card processing issues as announced by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP).” Earlier this …read more

The CONUS Quarterly now available for download

The March edition of The CONUS Quarterly is now available for free download. In this issue we look at today’s Q4 GDP data, what’s been going on with the A$ recently and cast our eyes over what new Treasurer, Curtis Pitt, has facing him in the Queensland economy. If you …read more

GDP +0.5%/+2.5% broadly in line with expectations. QLD falls again

Today’s release of the fourth quarter 2014 GDP data has come in broadly in line with market expectations. Quarterly growth was +0.5% for an annual increase of 2.5%. This compares with +0.4% q/q in Q3 (revised up from +0.3%) and +2.7% ann. The main drivers of growth were net exports (largely on the back of weaker imports) which added 0.7ppts …read more

Valuer-General’s 2015 Report on land values

The 2015 Property Market Movement Report from the Valuer-General shows residential land values in Cairns have increased by an average 12.9%, the Cassowary Coast sees values slip by 3.9% while Townsville remained static. The land values created by the Report are used by Councils in the determination of rates payable. In Cairns …read more

QLD leads a Building Approvals surge

Today’s release of Building Approvals in January has surprised the markets with a seasonally adjusted 7.9% increase (against expectations of a 1.8% decline). In addition previous months have been revised sharply higher. The seasonally adjusted annual growth figure is now 9.1%, slightly weaker than the 9.6% rate of Dec (although this was revised …read more

HTW revise down Cairns unemployment rate in Dec but still have the Trend heading up

Today sees the release of the Herron Todd White Cairns Watch report for February. In it we see that HTW are estimating Jan Trend unemployment in Cairns at 8.6%. The headline ABS unadjusted rate was 8.1% and our own Conus Trend came in at 7.5%. As we’ve discussed previously, there …read more

CAPEX disappoints and the mining slowdown hits QLD hard

Private Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) data from the ABS for the fourth quarter disappointed the market with a 2.2% decline on the quarter (against an expected 1.6% decline). This comes after an upward revision to the Q3 data saw a 0.2% increased upgraded to a 0.6% increase (see our post on …read more

Another look at Cairns Youth

Following on from our previous post (see here), we have now had time to take a look at the data to determine what has been going on with Cairns youth employment and population data. First we should acknowledge that the data-set which the ABS will be using when looking at …read more

Where are all Cairns’ young workers?

We didn’t have time to look at the youth unemployment data from the ABS on Thursday until today. The headline (and wildly volatile) un-adjusted data for January showed an increase in the unemployment rate of 15-24 year olds at 24.9% (up from 23.9% in Dec), a sharp fall in Participation …read more

Trend Unemployment rates improve but Cairns and Townsville is a “Tale of Two Cities”

Today’s ABS unadjusted regional labour force data for Jan is, as always, wildly volatile. As an example the headline unemployment rate in Mackay in Jan jumped to 10.3% (3rd highest in the state) despite being just 3.2% just 6 months ago. Clearly the Trend analysis is what we need to …read more

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