SEIFA tells an interesting story of the North; Townsville Cairns gap closes

Today saw the release of the 2016 Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), last seen in 2011. There are a number of indexes included in the release which tell us about relative socio-economic advantage and/or disadvantage of local areas down to the SA1 area, which are based on the 2016 Census data. …read more

TTNQ claim Chinese New Year as a success for FNQ

After some disappointing quarters for international tourism, including from China, into the Far North (see here for details), and the detrimental impact of the charter flight fiasco in the 2017 Chinese New Year it’s certainly encouraging to see TTNQ releasing some positive data relating to this year’s New Year period. …read more

International Visitors to Australia up 6.5%; TNQ continues to suffer down 0.4%

Today’s release of the International Visitor Survey for the year to Dec 2017 from Tourism Research Australia (available here) is once again bad news for TNQ. Despite visitor numbers to Australia increasing by 6.5% for the year to Dec, and those to Queensland up a less impressive 4.3%, the number …read more

SALM shows Mareeba Shire as the best performer in FNQ

The Dept of Employment recently released the latest Small Area Labour Market (SALM) data at the Local Government Area level for the quarter to December. Using the unsmoothed (original) SALM data, which is tucked away in the explanatory notes section, we have created a Conus SALM Trend series of unemployment …read more

Job Seekers data confirms improvements for Cairns

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

Regional Trend jobs data shows Cairns participation increase holding up unemployment rate

Today’s release by the ABS of regional jobs data is best seen through the lens of the Conus Trend series. What this shows us is Trend unemployment in Greater Brisbane at 5.8% while the Rest of Queensland sits at 6.1%, However, over the past year Greater Brisbane (with employment growth …read more

Tourism radio interview

There’s been plenty of interest in tourism following my post yesterday (see here) on the latest ABS Arrivals and Departures data. ABC Far North ran the story in their news bulletins this morning and later in the day I spoke to John McKenzie at radio 4CA; you can listen to …read more

Business count data shows Cairns up, Cassowary Coast unchanged

Data from the ABS released today shows the total number of businesses for the 2016-17 financial year. When we consider Cairns (which in this case we take as the SA3 areas of Cairns-North and Cairns-South) we see that the total number of businesses grew by 177 (or 1.3%) in 2016-17 …read more

Job Seeker data shows little change for Cairns

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

Regional Building Approvals shows QLD’s lack-lustre performance is due to the regions

Today’s release of regional building approvals data shows that the poor performance being seen in QLD (see here) is due to declines in the regions. Trend approvals across the state were up just 4.4% y/y in December but when we look at the regional breakdown (by way of the Conus …read more

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