Shock labour force data sees unemployment rate drop to 6 1/2 year low

Today’s labour force data for Sept has surprised the markets with just a 5,600 increase in employment (seasonally adjusted) but a drop to an unemployment rate of 5.0%, which is the lowest since April 2012. Expectations had centred around an increase in employment of around 15,000 with the unemployment rate …read more

International arrivals still growing; QLD gets its mojo back while Tassie slows

The release by the ABS of August short term arrivals and departures data shows total (seasonally adjusted) international short term arrivals into Australia was up 5.6% from a year ago while the annual total is up 5.2%. The growth from the Chinese market has continued to slow sharply (although it’s …read more

Regional Building Approvals shows Rest of Queensland nudging higher as Greater Brisbane drops away

The release by the ABS of the original regional building approvals data for August allows us to update our Conus Trend series for regional Queensland. In a month in which Queensland Trend approvals were unchanged (see here for last week’s commentary) we see a slightly different picture emerging between Greater …read more

Building Approvals disappoint, although QLD does a little better

The residential building approvals data for August has, once again, disappointed a market that had been looking for a small increase on the month. Seasonally adjusted data showed a 9.4% m/m decline with approvals now down 13.6% for the year. However, in such a volatile data series that is so …read more

TNQ once again with stunning domestic tourism results

Last quarter we talked about “stellar” results from the March 2018 National Visitor Survey in the Far North (see here). Well if last quarter was stellar then this quarter is on a whole new scale…”constellational”? The June 2018 National Visitor Survey from Tourism Research Australia (data available here) shows the …read more

Pete on ABC Brisbane talking Public Sector jobs

There’s been plenty of interest in our previous posts on Public Sector employment data (see here and here) and Pete spoke to Steve Austin on ABC Brisbane this afternoon with Alex Scott from the Together Union. It was an interesting discussion around the Govt’s fiscal principle related to the growth …read more

QLD Public Sector job growth has been in the SE corner…but so has population growth

Yesterday we took a look at the latest QLD Public Sector work force data for the June 2018 quarter (see here) where we noted that Public Sector full-time equivalent employment numbers continue to grow much faster than population. Since March 2015 FTE numbers in the Public Sector are up 11.9%. …read more

Queensland Public Sector employment continues to boom

The release of the June quarter Public Sector work force data shows (again) that the Government’s fiscal principle of keeping full-time equivalent Public Sector employment growth to that of population growth has not been met. FTE growth in the year to June 2018 was +3.6%, about twice the forecast pace …read more

Labour Account Industry data. Increased hourly rates equals cuts in hours worked

Today’s release of the June 2018 Labour Account data series (see here for more details) allows us to 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 year-on-year changes in the average …read more

Labour Account shows secondary jobs growing more than twice as fast as main jobs

Today the ABS released their experimental data series Labour Account Australia for the June 2018 quarter. In the ABS’s own words..”The Australian Labour Account consists of eleven sets of tables focusing on four central quadrants of Jobs, Persons, Labour Volume and Labour Payments. Data in each table are available annually, and …read more

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