Australian Economy

Cross-posted from The Conversation: It’s a tale of two Australias: older Australians are getting much wealthier, and the young are being left behind.

By Leith van Onselen Michael Pascoe has launched a scathing attack on Ross Gittins and his questioning of Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ agenda as civil war breaks out at Domainfax.

By Leith van Onselen From the ABC yesterday evening: Holden will close its Adelaide plant in less than three weeks, on October 20, placing 944 people out of work.

From the AIG: ▪ The Australian Industry Group Australian Performance of Manufacturing Index (Australian PMI® ) fell 5.6 points in September to 54.2 points (seasonally adjusted), indicating a deceleration in growth after August’s spike to a recent high of 59.8 points.

Cross-posted from The Glass Pyramid: Macrobusiness reported the latest ABS release on demographics: “…….The ABS released its Australian demographic statistics for the March quarter of 2017, which revealed that Australia’s overall population growth rate has accelerated led by unprecedented growth in Victoria, which has once again obliterated records.

By Leith van Onselen The ABS today released its half-yearly Internet Activity report, which reported near exponential growth in data usage despite only moderate (2.1%) annual growth in internet subscribers: The total volume of data downloaded in the three months ended 30 June 2017 was 3.0 million Terabytes (or 3.0 Exabytes).

By Leith van Onselen The income recession afflicting Australia has been well documented on this site.

Australia is in the midst of another of its grand macroeconomic experiments.

Via The Australian: Peter Cook has spent almost three decades working for Toyota in Melbourne but in less than a week he’s due to become one of thousands of new job seekers.

Via the IMF: Over the past three years, labor markets in many advanced economies have shown increasing signs of healing from the Great Recession of 2008-09.

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released job vacancies data for the August quarter, which recorded a 6.0% seasonally adjusted rise over the quarter and a 3.9% rise in trend terms: Over the year, job vacancies rose by 15.4% in seasonally adjusted terms and by 14.0% in trend terms.

On many occasions I have observed that client states tend to take on the political economy trapping of their imperial betters.

Via the AFR: Housing construction continues to defy predictions of a collapse, with increasing residential cranes across Australian skylines pushing the total number to a new high of 685, the latest RLB Crane Index shows.

By Leith van Onselen Back in December 2015, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched his $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda under much fanfare.

By Leith van Onselen With NSW’s (read Sydney’s) population growing at a break-neck pace (see below chart), there is a revolt underway from within the NSW Liberal Party against the federal government’s mass immigration program and over-development across Sydney.

By Leith van Onselen The ABS released its Australian demographic statistics for the March quarter of 2017, which revealed that Australia’s overall population growth rate has accelerated led by unprecedented growth in Victoria, which has once again obliterated records.

By Leith van Onselen The ABS yesterday released engineering construction data for the June quarter of 2017, which revealed a 21.7% seasonally adjusted rise in the value of work done over the quarter and a 19.0% increase over the year, but an ongoing reduction in the construction pipeline.

Here’s Ross Gittin’s response to Andrew Leigh’s open borders garbage today: Talk about a slow burn.

More breathless reporting from Domainfax on the Botox Boom today: There is a $62 billion building boom across Sydney’s city, from infrastructure projects to commercial, residential and developments sites, which has underpinned the latest wave of demand for physical assets.

By Leith van Onselen ANZ has released a new report warning that unrelenting immigration-fuelled population growth will continue to make life difficult for aspiring first home buyers.