As summarised earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has today released its labour force report for January, which registered a small fall in employment and a 0.2% rise in the headline unemployment rate to 6.0%. The result missed analyst’s expectations that the unemployment rate would remain steady on the back of the creation of 15,000 jobs.
In trend terms, the unemployment rate fell 0.1% to 5.8%:
Again, total employment fell a seasonally adjusted 7,900 to 11,894,500, with full-time employment decreasing by 40,600 to 8,185,800, partly offset by a 32,700 increase in part-time jobs to 3,708,700.
The participation rate held more or less firm at 65.2%:
The trend in total employment has flattened after October’s and November’s numberwang:
Annual employment growth is being driven mostly by part-time employment:
The housing bubble epicentre of New South Wales (Sydney) continue to drive jobs growth, accounting for 55% of new jobs over the past year in seasonally adjusted terms (see next chart).
And South Australia and Tasmania has the highest seasonally adjusted unemployment, whereas the bubble epicentre of New South Wales (Sydney) has by far the lowest unemployment (see next chart).
The state seasonally-adjusted figures are notoriously volatile and subject to a big margin of error. As such, the below chart shows the ABS’ trend unemployment rates, which shows the housing bubble market of New South Wales with by far the lowest unemployment, South Australia and Tasmania with the highest, and Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria with above-average unemployment but improving trends:
A positive from this release is that the aggregate number of hours worked rose sharply in seasonally adjusted terms in January (up 10.9 million hours or 0.7%). Hours worked have also risen by 2.0% over the past year, which is above the growth in the population:
The below chart, which tracks the changes in hours worked on a trend basis, shows that the housing bubble epicentre of New South Wales (Sydney) has driven a large share of the growth, with Victoria and Queensland also experiencing a decent uplift. By contrast, South Australia and Western Australia remain in the gutter:
Finally, to round things out, the next chart summarises the annual change in the key employment aggregates on a seasonally-adjusted basis, which shows the solid improvement over the year:
Nothing has changed to the outlook following this release. The housing-induced boom in employment will likely reverse in the second half as dwelling construction and prices begin to fall, coinciding with the ongoing contraction of mining investment and the closure of the car industry from late in the year.
