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
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
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
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
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
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
As we noted a few days ago (see here) the Building Approvals situation in Cairns is improving with the Conus Trend data showing a slight increase for April (after some sharp downward revisions to previous months).Today’s Cairns Post is running a rather excitable article, quoting the Deputy Mayor, talking about approvals …read more
As was the case last month (see our commentary here), nationwide and state building approvals have come in much weaker than expected; this month FNQ has also weakened.Seasonally adjusted approvals nationwide fell 5.6% in April (against expectations of a rise around 2%) and were up just 1.1% from a year ago. …read more
“Building approvals, tourism figures, unemployment rate, real estate market, private sector investment…all much stronger now than at any point of the past five years under the former Labor Government.” So says Member for Cairns Gavin King on his Facebook page referring to a speech he made in parliament on May …read more
There is much talk in the media about the potential jobs impact if/when the Aquis integrated-resort goes ahead north of Cairns. The company’s statements talk of 3,750 jobs in the construction phase rising to about 11,000 when fully operational in 2018. To put these numbers in some context let’s just …read more