The Dept of Employment recently released the latest Small Area Labour Market (SALM) data at the Local Government Area level for the quarter to March 2018. Using the unsmoothed (original) SALM data, which is tucked away in the explanatory notes section, we have created a Conus SALM Trend series of …read more
The release by the ABS of the April regional building approvals data is best seen through the lens of the Conus Trend. In April we saw the ABS Trend for residential approvals in Queensland up by 5.6% for the year (see here for details). When we consider the Conus Trend …read more
Today saw the release by the Dept of Social Services of the April jobseeker data and allows us to update and release our own Conus/CBC Staff Selection Jobseeker Trend series. The original, unadjusted data for Cairns (made up of 5 relevant SA3 areas) shows the number of jobseekers decreased slightly …read more
The regional employment data for April from the ABS needs to be seen through the lens of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Employment Trend to make much sense of. What this shows us is the picture in Cairns continues to deteriorate with Trend employment having fallen for 9 consecutive months. Trend …read more
Readers of the Cairns Post this weekend might be justifiably confused about what is actually happening with employment in the region. Following the release by the ABS of regional labour force data on Thursday the Post ran a story on Friday talking about the fact that Cairns had “added 6,100 …read more
Today saw the ABS release their regional population estimates for June 2017. When we consider the data at the SA4 level we see that Cairns grew by almost 3,000 people to just above 250,000 in the year from June 2016; that’s a 1.2% increase. Despite the fact that this is …read more
The release of the Public Sector employment data for the Dec 2017 quarter allows us to take a look at which regions have seen the greatest increases this year, and since the ALP came to power in 2015. What we see, when considering Full-time equivalents (FTE), is an increase of …read more
Last week we saw the ABS release of building approvals data for February demonstrate that (on a Trend basis) Queensland was still doing somewhat better than the nation with approvals growth of 6.9% y/y versus 5.5% for Australia as a whole. This week the regional data shows us that the Far …read more
Regular readers will be well aware that there are various ways to look at the labour market; the standard “unemployment rate” being just one of them. Another, less well known measure, is provided by way of the Dept of Social Services data in their monthly payment recipients release (available here). When looking …read more
Today saw the release of the Feb monthly Regional Labour Force and the quarterly regional Industry employment data. Both data-sets are best seen through the lens of the Conus Trend series, so we shall start with the monthly data. Employment growth across QLD remains strong at 4.7% y/y (see here …read more