Australian Economy

Via the ABC: South Australia’s largest private employer, convenience store chain OTR, has been accused of wage theft that could amount to $70 million in underpayments to thousands of employees.

Big Australia booster, Jessica Irvine, has penned another strawman article to attack calls to lower Australia’s immigration intake back to historical norms: Already we hear voices calling for caps on migration and reinstating domestic industries.

The ABS is out with the April jobs report: The unemployment rate is a joke, resulting from ABS skullduggery over why less people participated.

Thanks to Westpac: Change in total employment: March +5.9k, WBC f/c: –450k, Mkt f/c: -550k Range: –125k to –1,000k The timing of the labour force survey – covering the first two weeks of the month – meant the March update did not capture the impact of broad based lockdowns implemented late in the month.

CBA has released debit and credit card data showing that Australian consumers are increasing their expenditure on a range of household goods following a big slump during the COVID-19 lockdown: Analysis from our CBA credit &debit card spend data to the weekending 8May continues to suggest household expenditure has shifted gears.

Via UBS: Some early positive signs: Aus job ads c55k vs. the c45k end of April trough Australian job inventories have shown another week-on-week improvement (see figure 1 below).

The federal government’s JobKeeper scheme is slated to end on 27 September.

Via the ABC: There’s a battle of ideas over how to reinvigorate the economy after the shock of COVID-19, but the make-up of the advisory body the Federal Government has set up to lead the recovery gives a good indication of which way it’s leaning.

From The ABS: COVID-19 travel restrictions saw a 99 per cent decrease in overseas arrivals to Australia in April 2020, compared with April 2019 according to provisional data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released its Labor Price Index for the March quarter of 2020, which revealed plummeting wage growth in the lead-up to the COVID-19 lockdown: According to the ABS, wages grew by just 0.52% (both s.a. and trend) in the March quarter.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gave an economic update yesterday mapping out the deep impacts of the COVID-19 shutdown on the Australian economy and federal budget.

Nothing we don’t know given the move in the ANZ measure: • The Westpac-Melbourne Institute Index of Consumer Sentiment rebounded 16.4% to 88.1 in May from the extremely weak 75.6 read in April.

The MSM is clutching its Chinese pearls today.

From ANZ-Roy Morgan: Confidence continued to gain last week, though the pace of increase eased.

Via the excellent Damien Boey at Credit Suisse: Mixed April NAB business survey: The NAB survey for April revealed an even sharper decline in business conditions, with the component sum index falling to -34 from a downwardly revised -22.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released visitor arrivals and departures statistics for the month of March, which reveals a massive decline in visitor numbers on the back of COVID-19 travel bans.

Roy Morgan Research has released its inflations expectations survey, which have cratered to a near record low 3.6% over the next two years: Women expect price increases of 4.2% per year over the next two years while men expect prices to increase 3%.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane is one of the few members of the Left to acknowledge that the flood of temporary migrants into Australia has undercut workers and contributed to weak wage growth: Restrictions on immigration are, in the view of neoliberals, particularly damaging.

What else would you call this: This: And this: A bloody mess.

KPMG has warned that the Australian economy will not recover its losses from the coronavirus pandemic until the September 2021 quarter.

Callam Pickering, economist at global jobs site Indeed, has updated his job ad series, which suggests the Australian labour market is slowly climbing off the canvass.