Leading into today’s figures, here’s a negative taster:
July unemployment rose 0.9% to 10.5% – nearly double the current ABS figure for June 2016 (5.8%). Now 1.365 million Australians (up 268,000 since July 2015) are unemployed. The rising level of unemployment over the past year was caused by an increase in the size of the overall Australian workforce to 13,007,000 (up 334,000 since July 2015) which wasn’t matched by a similar increase in employment.
In fact, full-time employment fell 217,000 to 7,683,000 from July 2015 while part-time employment was up 283,000 to 3,959,000 – however, not enough new jobs were created to lower unemployment. Now a total of 11,642,000 Australians are employed (up 66,000 since July 2015);
The increasing part-time employment led directly to an increase in under-employment over the past year – now at 9% (1,171,000 Australians, up 194,000 since July 2015) are under-employed (up 1.3%) – working part-time and looking for more hours;
In July a total of 2.536 million Australians (19.5% of the workforce) were either unemployed or under-employed. This is up a very large 462,000 from July 2015 (up 3.1%).
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David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
