Building Approvals slip but the FNQ data holds up

Today’s release of ABS Building Approvals data for June showed a surprise decline of 5% (seasonally adjusted) for a 16% increase over the year. Both houses and unit approvals fell. The less volatile Trend series showed a monthly fall of 1.1% for a year on year gain of 7.9%. Despite …read more

Comparing CCRC rates

Following on from our post last week, which itself was in response to an excellent piece from Loose Change, we have now had some time to take a look at the general rates being charged across the region for the 2014-15 financial year. As was highlighted in the original post, …read more

How NOT to compare rates across Councils

Loose Change has an excellent post on the flaws inherent with using misleading data to compare rates across varying Councils. As Mark points out, the protocol of comparing rate levels at a given average land valuation level makes no sense whatsoever when land valuations vary so much from Council to …read more

Cairns unemployment ticks higher but Trend is still down

Today’s release of regional labour force data from the ABS shows the unadjusted unemployment rate in Cairns ticking higher to 8.2% in June (from 5.3% in May). However, as ever, we really need to consider the Conus Trend series to make any sense of this highly volatile data. The Conus …read more

Cairns rentals and the impact of the mining investment slowdown further South

Mark Beath over at Loose Change has written a very interesting piece on the trends for rental rates in some major QLD centres. While his commentary focuses on the changes in Cairns, and makes mention of the potential Aquis-effect on future rentals, it is also interesting to see the impact …read more

ABS National Regional Profile ’08-’12

Today saw the (delayed) release of the National Regional Profile for 2008-’12. The full detail is available on the ABS website here. Among the mountain of data contained in 8 large spreadsheets are numbers on population by Local Government Area (LGA) as well as by Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2). SA2’s and …read more

Building Approvals data hiding weakness

The Building Approvals data for May would appear, on the face of it, to be very strong. The market had been expecting a rise of about 3.2% m/m in the seasonally adjusted data. Instead the result came in at +9.9% (+14.3% y/y). However, the strength is primarily down to very strong …read more

First look at the Aquis EIS

The release of the Aquis Environment Impact Statement (EIS, available here) has given everyone concerned a ton of reading to do! We decided to focus on the Economic section (Chapter 13) and even that runs to 44 pages; even the Executive Summary is 88 pages!Anyway, a first reading of the Economic …read more

Cairns Post gets confused on youth unemployment

In today’s Cairns Post Nick Dalton has a piece about youth unemployment in Cairns. Although we are gratified to discover that Nick is actually reading this blog, it appears that he is still somewhat confused about the actual data. Nick says “Last month youth unemployment was 21.8 per cent, according to the …read more

QLD and Cairns jobs data show real improvements

We have today returned from a trip up to Cape York and have now had time to look at the employment data for May released during our absence.The data for QLD showed a decline in the headline unemployment rate to 6.2% (from 6.3%) with a very encouraging increase of 18,200 …read more

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