ANZ jobs ads for September are out and fell another 2.8% on the month:
Here’s the total ads chart:
And the growth chart:
And from ANZ:
The trend in newspaper and internet job advertisements is a signal of a softening labour market. Total advertisements have fallen for the past six months, and in more recent times this decline has been seen across all states. When this last occurred, in the second half of 2011, Australian employment growth slowed. Given the evidence of a mild contraction in labour hiring intentions across Australia, we expect the labour market to continue to soften, and for the unemployment rate to drift higher in coming months.
• Consistent with some recent project delays and cancellations in the mining sector, along with falls in the prices of Australia’s key commodity exports, newspaper job advertisements in the mining states of Western Australia and Queensland declined in September. The Northern Territory is the exception to this, although its monthly advertisements are typically very volatile. In each of these regions, however, newspaper job advertisements are now in trend decline.
• It is this recent weakness in the mining states, along with general weakness in the overall labour market – more so than the indication of the headline official unemployment rate – that likely hastened the RBA’s decision to cut the official cash rate by 25bps last week.
• This Thursday, the ABS releases the September labour force data. ANZ forecasts for employment to have continued growing much more slowly than growth in the population and for the unemployment rate to have increased 0.2 percentage points to 5.3%.
