The Cairns Post runs a story this morning highlighting the fact that the number of travellers through the airport breached the 4.5 million mark in the financial year ending June 2014; and so they did. The full statistics are available from Cairns Airport here. Unfortunately for the ever-vigilant Post the …read more
An interesting report from the Dept of Infrastructure and Regional Development provides data for the year to June 2014 on the performance of our local airlines and airports. Included in the report are details of which airline had the best on-time performance for departures (Qantas and Regional Express) and arrivals …read more
Comments from a reader to yesterday’s post regarding Cairns and Townsville regional labour force data, together with a post from Loose Change on Cairns Participation, have spurred me into taking a closer look at Participation in both regions and the effect this is having on the unemployment rate. To recap; …read more
The ABS release of regional labour market data has shown the Cairns region performed remarkably well in July despite the national and state weakness that we saw last week (see here for our comments at the time). The headline, unadjusted data might appear unbelievably good but when we see through that and …read more
Feelings are running hot in Cairns regarding the proposed Aquis Resort. The anti-Aquis community group Aquis Aware Coalition of Concerned Citizens has publicly released their submission on the Environmental Impact Statement; and they’re obviously not fans. However, while criticising (with some justification) the EIS for its accuracy and content, the group’s …read more
Today’s Cairns Post carries an article which starts with “Building approvals are booming”. Unfortunately for the Post the article then goes on to quote from sources which clearly indicate that approvals are not in fact “booming”. Consider the following quotes.. Rick Carr in the July’s HTW Cairns Watch (from which the article …read more
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
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
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
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