Regional labour force Trends look good for Cairns

The ABS release of their original regional labour force September data allows us to update our own Conus/CBC Staff Selection Regional Employment Trends for Queensland; and they show us a positive picture for Cairns. The national and state-wide data released last week (see commentary here) saw the headline unemployment rates …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

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

Trend Jobseekers fall in Cairns and Townsville

With the ABS regional labour force data, and the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Employment Trend of that data, showing the unemployment situation improving  in Cairns over the past few of months it’s no surprise that today’s release from the Dept of Social Services of jobseeker data (and the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Jobseeker Trend …read more

Conus Trend SALM data for local Councils

The Dept of Employment today released their Small Area Labour Market data for the June 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 …read more

Quarterly Industry Employment in Cairns

Today saw the release of the industry employment data for the August quarter by the ABS. The ABS provide the regional data as a 4-quarters average; we prefer the more timely Conus Trend which is created using the dis-aggregated individual quarters. Looking at Cairns we see the main growth sectors …read more

Regional employment Trends; Cairns improves while Rest of QLD beats Greater Brisbane

The updated Conus/CBC Staff Selection Regional Employment Trend data for August shows the Trend unemployment rate in Cairns stable at 6.3% with the addition of 1,700 to Trend employment. All of those extra positions came in the full-time sector with part-time employment falling 100. A strong increase in Trend participation …read more

Slowdown in QLD building approvals is coming from the regions

Today saw the release of the original regional building approvals data from the ABS for July. Last week we saw QLD’s Trend approvals drop by 0.3% m/m and 1.9% y/y (see here for details). Today’s data (when seen through the lens of the Conus Trend series) shows us that those …read more

Updated regional population data. Cairns thumping Townsville

The ABS today revised their regional population data for 2016 and 2017, so we wanted to update our post from April (see original here) to reflect the revised data. At the SA4 level Cairns increased from 2016 to 2017 by 3,061 people (or 1.2%). We can dig deeper into the …read more

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