Fairfax’s Adele Ferguson continued her four year campaign against wage theft over the weekend, which mostly involves migrants on temporary visas: At 7-Eleven thousands of workers were students on visas who were underpaid… Since the 7-Eleven scandal there have been many more companies caught up in underpayment issues including Domino’s, Caltex, Retail Food Group, Pizza
Andrew Stone is a veteran economist that spent five years at the Australian Treasury and more than a decade at the Reserve Bank of Australia before working for nearly five years as Chief Economist and senior policy advisor to the Tony Abbott. In his new book, entitled Restoring Hope: Practical Policies to Revitalize the Australian
After years of overly optimistic wage growth forecasts: Today’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) has significantly downgraded wage growth from the 2019 Federal Budget: The four year forecasts are shown below, which projects that wage growth will rebound to 3% by 2022-23: MB does not support these forecasts. Unemployment is expected to rise materially
Auction clearance rates retraced over the weekend, with the preliminary rate nationally falling to 69.2% from 74.5% last weekend: However, the nation auction clearance rate was still way above the 41.0% recorded in the same weekend last year: Sydney’s preliminary clearance rate was 73.6%, down from 78.1% last weekend, but way above the 41.3% recorded
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its International Trade: Supplementary Information, Financial Year, 2018-19 report, which includes interesting data on Australia’s booming international student trade. According to the ABS, total education ‘exports’ soared by $5.0 billion in 2018-19 to a record high $37.3 billion (see next chart). Expenditure on goods and services by international
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As we already know, Sydney is a primary entry point for migrants: And Western Sydney is the prime dumping ground for these migrants: With Western Sydney also projected to receive the lion’s share future immigration-driven population growth – i.e. an additional 1.2 million people over the next 20 years, according to the Greater Sydney Commission:
The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia (REIWA) has released its rental data for the September quarter, which reveals that Perth’s rental market has tightened, with the vacancy rate falling to 2.5%: This is yet to translate meaningfully into rents, however, which remained flat over the past three quarters; although they have risen $10 for
I reluctantly ducked into Chadstone Shopping Centre earlier this week to buy Christmas gifts and was pleasantly surprised by how quiet the centre was. I hate shopping – even more so during Christmas, where the crowds are infuriating. I live reasonably close to Chadstone, therefore, rode my bike to avoid car parking. However, to my
David Alexander, managing director of government relations firm Barton Deakin, has penned a thoughtful article in The Australian explaining how the never-ending flood of cheap migrant workers is lowering Australian wages: The expansion in imported labour numbers in recent years has been dramatic. According to the Migrant Worker Taskforce Report, as at June 30 last
Back in June, the Australian Institute of Building Surveyors (AIBS) released a member communique warning that “the situation around Professional Indemnity (PI) Insurance has reached crisis point” with “a real possibility that without government intervention… private building surveyors may be forced out of work and the construction industry across Australia will be significantly impacted”. The
Last month, Martin North and John Adams challenged the credibility of the various private sector property indices, which were reporting strong rebounds in property values, claiming “the establishment has sought to kill the counter narrative that the market is falling”. I brushed off their claims at the time and said that “we’ll get confirmation when
Fifteen years of rapid population growth has driven a massive infrastructure deficit across Australia’s cities although estimates of this backlog vary significantly. For example, the 2013 National Infrastructure Plan produced by the Federal Government’s advisory body, Infrastructure Australia, concluded that “we still face a significant infrastructure deficit, estimated at around A$300 billion”. Infrastructure Australia’s 2018
In the week ended 12 December 2019, the CoreLogic 5-city daily dwelling price index, which covers the five major capital city markets, surged another 0.32%: The rise in values was broad-based, but again driven by Sydney and Melbourne: So far in December, dwelling values have risen by 0.54%, again driven by Sydney and Melbourne: Quarterly
The Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday published its overseas short-term arrivals figures for October, with Chinese visitors hitting fresh all-time highs. The number of short-term visitor arrivals rose by 2.7% in the year to October, whereas short-term resident departures rose by 2.9%. The ratio of annual arrivals to departures remained at 81.4%: Net short-term arrivals
As it currently stands, India is Australia’s second biggest market for international students, trailing far behind first placed China. As at August 2019, there were 240,000 Chinese nationals enrolled to study in Australia, almost double the 126,000 Indian nationals enrolled (see next chart). The imbalance is even greater with respect to ‘exports’ from international students
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Last weekend, CoreLogic released its preliminary auction clearance rates, which revealed the following results: Today, CoreLogic has released its final auction results, which reported a 3.4% decline in the final national auction clearance rate to 71.1% – well above the same weekend last year (41.0%) but below last week’s 73.6%: As you can see, Sydney’s
During the peak of the last housing cycle in 2017, MB coined the phrase “shrinkflation” to describe the peculiar situation whereby housing prices rise strongly alongside crashing sales volumes. Australia’s housing market is experiencing another round of shrinkflation with dwelling values surging at the same time as turnover remains anaemic. The latest evidence comes from
In the lead-up to the September 2017 general election, the New Zealand Labour Party launched a plan to reduce immigration by around a third in a bid to relieve chronic housing and infrastructure pressures (especially around Auckland): …in recent years our population has been growing rapidly as record numbers of migrants arrive here. This has
It’s raining mid-year Budget Updates with Victoria’s also released today: The general government sector operating surplus is estimated to be $618 million in 2019-20, with annual operating surpluses averaging $3.3 billion a year across the forward estimates. Compared with the 2019-20 Budget, the net result from transactions has been revised down by an average of
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released visitor arrivals and departures statistics for the month of October, which reveals that the number of permanent and long-term arrivals into Australia remains turbo-charged. In the year to October 2019, there were a record 844,240 permanent and long-term arrivals into Australia, up 2% from October 2018, and
The NSW government has announced a 2019-20 budget surplus of $702 million in its mid-year economic review, down from a forecast a surplus of $1.016 billion in the June budget. The government expects surpluses to average $1.9 billion over the next four years, with stamp duty revenue being boosted by a rebound in Sydney’s housing
One of the most profound changes affecting the Australian economy and society this century has been the massive lift in Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) and population growth under the multi-partisan Big Australia policy. This rapid population growth is projected to continue for decades to come, if current policy settings favouring high immigration continue. The
Martin North from Digital Finance Analytics talks mortgage statistics with FreshCanvas. They argue that auction clearance rates can be manipulated and of questionable reliability. My view is that CoreLogic’s series, whose sample is much more robust than Domain’s, is the best short-term indicator for house prices. And this is reflected in the strong correlation between
The best single measure of how the Australian economy is travelling is not real gross domestic product (GDP), but real domestic final demand (DFD), which is the sum of “government final consumption expenditure, household final consumption expenditure, private gross fixed capital formation and the gross fixed capital formation of public corporations and general government”. Australia’s
Last week’s national accounts release for the September quarter revealed that Australia’s FIRE economy – Finance, Insurance and Rental, Hiring & Real Estate Services – has shrunk relative to the Australian economy, falling to 11.6% from a peak of 11.8%: This follows more than 30-years of explosive growth since financial markets were first deregulated in
The latest quarterly dwelling price results for Sydney shows that values are rising at around 6.4%, which is equivalent to the peaks experienced during the 2015 and 2017 booms: Indeed, since bottoming in May 2019, Sydney dwelling values have surged by around 8.5%. While Sydney’s dwelling values are booming, the same cannot be said for
Global Macro / Markets / Investing: ‘Everything Is Not Fine’: Nobel Economist Calls on Humanity to End Obsession With GDP – Common Dreams Fed QE4 could happen before year end, Credit Suisse says – CNBC Chevron to Take $11 Billion Writedown Amid Weak Gas Prices – Bloomberg Americas: The massive triumph of the rich, illustrated
