Job vacancies continue downward trend

By Leith van Onselen

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) this morning released job vacancies data for the February quarter, which continued their downward trend:

• Total job vacancies in February 2012 were 182,200, a decrease of 0.3% from November 2011.
• The number of job vacancies in the private sector was 165,300 in February 2012, a decrease of 0.2% from November 2011.
• The number of job vacancies in the public sector was 16,900 in February 2012, a decrease of 1.5% from November 2011.

Unfortunately, due to budget cuts, this survey was suspended for 21 months over 2008-09, leaving a large gap in the data. Nevertheless, the data is now showing that the number of job vacancies are trending down after rising strongly between November 2009 and November 2010:

Counter-intuitively, job vacancies fell in the mining states and rose in the non-mining states:

The overall decline in job vacancies contradicts the more frequent ANZ job ads index, which hit a 27-month high in February.

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