Employment in detail: Mixed signals

Thursday 18 October 2018

As summarised earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today released its labour force report for September, which registered a soft 5,600 increase in total employment but a sharp 0.3% drop in the headline unemployment rate to 5.0% driven by a sharp 2.4% fall in labour force participation.

In trend terms, the unemployment rate fell marginally from 5.25% to 5.17% – a six year low:

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About the author

Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.