According to the latest official figures, around 709,000 people are currently unemployed in Australia.
However, Jim Stanford from the Centre for Future Work suggests that the unemployment rate could be as high as 19.7 per cent if both the underemployed and the ‘marginally attached’ are taken into account.
The underemployed are those people who are working some hours but who would like more, while the marginally attached are people who are available to work and would like to be employed, but are not looking for a job. This group is also referred to as ‘discouraged workers’, and there are said to be as many as 1.055 million of them.