Trend employment growth in Cairns slows again as the regions struggle to keep up with Greater Brisbane

The release by the ABS of their Dec original regional labour force data allows us to update the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Regional Employment Trend data for Queensland. It shows us the Rest of QLD struggling to keep pace with Greater Brisbane; Trend employment growth in the Greater Brisbane area now …read more

TNQ’s falling market share getting some much needed attention

As regular readers will be aware, we have been highlighting TNQ’s declining share of the tourism market for many years so it’s encouraging to see the issue (finally) being addressed head-on by the region’s main tourism marketing arm, TTNQ. Over the past seven years TNQ’s share of Australia’s total tourism …read more

Domestic tourism provides solid boost to the Far North

The release this morning by Tourism Research Australia of the National and International Visitor Surveys for the Sept 2019 quarter (available here) will have provided some light relief for the tourism industry in our region; although the good news was restricted to the domestic sector. Across Australia total domestic visitor …read more

Greater Brisbane showing most of the improvment in building approvals

As we noted last week (see here), the decline in building approvals appears to have at least slowed. Today sees the release of the original ABS regional approvals data which allows us to update our Conus Trend series. This shows that the bulk of the ‘improvement’, in the form of …read more

Trend Jobseekers continue to fall despite rises in unemployed

The Dept of Social Services original Jobseekers data for November, released today, allows us to update our Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Jobseeker series for Cairns and Townsville. It shows that, while the number unemployed has lifted in recent months, the Trend number of people claiming Youth and Newstart Allowances has …read more

Labour Account highlights the weakness in Regional QLD income growth

Today’s release of the Sept 2019 Labour Account data series provides a wealth of information. 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 year-on-year changes …read more

Tourism Satellite Accounts confirm 2017-18 was a good year for TNQ…but don’t tell us much else

TRA released their annual Tourism Satellite Accounts overnight for the 2017-18 financial year. There’s a bunch of quite interesting (although obviously already almost 18 months out-of-date) stuff in the release which can be found in full here. Looking at the higher level data we see that the tourism sector generated …read more

Trend Jobseekers continue to decline in Cairns

The release of the original Jobseeker data from the Dept of Social Services for October allows us to update the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Jobseeker Trend data for Cairns and Townsville. It confirms the continued decline in the number of people receiving Youth and Newstart Allowances in the regions. Cairns has …read more

Diversity in regional economies in QLD and NSW

Last week at the launch of the Invest Cairns initiative from The Cairns Post and Advance Cairns the issue of economic diversity, and in particular the diversity of the Cairns economy, was a major topic of conversation. My presentation at the launch presented some clear evidence that the Cairns economy …read more

Regional Building approvals; Cairns edges higher, Townsville very slightly lower

Last week saw the national and state building approvals data show a continued decline, although the pace of that decline has slowed. Queensland Trend approvasl fell by 19.1% y/y which was the slowest rate of decline in a year. Today’s original data from the ABS (when seen through the lens …read more

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