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

Regional Jobs data across QLD for 2017

As usual, we create the Conus Trend regional jobs data from the original ABS monthly data for Dec before making any real analysis. The results for the year to Dec 2017 across the state are detailed below. We see that Trend employment growth in QLD beat the nation by a …read more

How long does it take to get a job in QLD?

I was spurred into action this week by an article from John McCarthy in the Courier Mail  (see here) in which he discussed the ABS data for the median length of time job seekers are spending looking for work. It’s not a data set that I’ve previously looked at much but …read more

Regional Labour Force and Industry Jobs data

Our catch-up of regional data continues with the November regional labour force numbers and the quarterly industry jobs numbers. Both of these data sets we prefer to analyse through the lens of the respective Conus Trend series. For the regional monthly jobs data we prepare the Conus Trend using the …read more

Domestic tourism data for TNQ confirms ongoing worries

We’ve been away from the office for almost three weeks over Christmas and the New Year, so now is the time to start to catch up on the regional data released since we left; and we’re staring with the National Visitor Survey for the September quarter released by Tourism Research …read more

SALM data supports improving picture in the North

On Friday the Dept of Employment released the latest Small Area Labour Market (SALM) data at the Local Government Area level for the quarter to Sept. 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

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