Queensland Employment Compared

If you thought things felt a little crappy in Queensland on the jobs front you'd be right. This from MacroBusiness's Leith van Onselen. Western Australia powering ahead.

Maybe cutting so hard, so quickly on public sector jobs wasn't the right thing to do right now.

Still they'll need to re-employ all those people reasonably soon either back as public servants or as consultants.  

Should be good for those graduating in 2-3 years time.

Good 'Problems' for the Australian Economy

While the global economic situation is precarious at the moment, things could be much, much worse for Australia.

As much as the Coalition and The Australian want to paint the Australian economic news out this week as not quite as good as it actually was, its hard to argue against the proposition that in aggregate Australia is doing very, very well at the moment.

The first news out was the Australian National Accounts. A quarterly expansion of 1.3 per cent was a big surprise.

Mining was obviously the standout, but even manufacturing held steady.

The second result on employment could be spun negatively because the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate increased, but there was actually an increase in overall employment as more people entered the labour force looking for work.

According to the ABS:

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED ESTIMATES (MONTHLY CHANGE)

■Employment increased 38,900 (0.3%) to 11,537,900. Full-time employment increased 46,100 (0.6%) to 8,107,900 and part-time employment decreased 7,200 (0.2%) to 3,430,100.

■Unemployment increased 22,400 (3.7%) to 622,800. The number of persons looking for full-time work increased 6,500 (1.5%) to 430,000 and the number of persons looking for part-time work increased 15,900 (9.0%) to 192,800.

■The unemployment rate increased 0.2 pts to 5.1%. The male unemployment rate was steady at 4.8% and the female unemployment rate increased 0.3 pts to 5.5%.

■The participation rate increased 0.3 pts to 65.5%.

■Aggregate monthly hours worked decreased 4.7 million hours to 1,627.2 million hours.

Another series out from the ABS was on industrial disputes. Despite vast improvments in this area over recent years,  it was surprising (not) to see The Australian, put a negative spin on the figures. The paper reported focused on the fact that industrial disputes were up over the year despite the fact that over the last 3 months they had fallen markedly.

As Luke Williams reported in Crikey:

The latest figures from the ABS indicate if the March 2012 pattern continues the 2012 average would be about 134,000 — still less than the John Howard years of 2005 (228,000), 2004 (379,000), 2003 (439,000), 2002 (259,000), 2001 (394,000) and 2000 (469,100). These figures alone shows how selected it is to call the latest figures a “seven-year high”.

While the number of days lost per industrial disputes increased in 2011 (257,000) when compared with 2010 (126,000), as well as 2009 (132,000) and 2008 (196,000), the number of industrial disputes actually decreased. The 2011 figure was also up from record lows under the unpopular WorkChoices legislation in 2007 with 49,000 days lost, but still comparable to 2006 (132,000 days lost) and 2005 (228,000 days lost).

Overall, the industrial dispute levels continue at an overall trend of historic lows. While the Fair Work Act started operation on July 1, 2009, the average number of working days lost per dispute decreased from 1110 to 558 between 2008 and 2010.

...

Looking through past ABS figures highlights the difference even further — there were 460,000 days lost in 1999, 526,000 in 1998 and 928,500 in 1996. This compares to pre-accord and reform days; there were some 1.3 million days lost in 1987 and a massive 5.42 million in 1973.

Never let the facts get in the way of an ideological message.

The following graph from The Economist shows the  'problem' of the difficulty of finding workers in Australia and why, if the mining boom continues, there will be more foreign workers coming into Australia.

According to The Economist:

UNEMPLOYMENT has reached record levels in many countries. Yet more than a third of employers around the world are still having trouble filling vacancies, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of nearly 40,000 employers in 41 countries. Workers in skilled trades (electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and so on) are in shortest supply, followed by engineers and sales people. Talent shortages are most acute in Asia, particularly in Japan where an ageing population is exacerbating the problem. Only in France has the proportion of employers struggling to find appropriate talent increased significantly since last year (from 20% to 29%). In Italy, by contrast, it has halved from 29% to 14%. Overall, employers are less concerned about the impact of skills shortages than they were in 2011. This may be because companies are becoming more comfortable conducting business in an uncertain environment where talent shortages persist.

Unemployment and the Global Recession: Australian Exceptionalism

Australia's employment/unemployment outcomes during the global crisis has been truly outstanding. This is made incredibly clear from some excellent graphs in Treasurer Wayne Swan's regular Economic Note.

Wayne Swan's Economic Note surprisingly provides (seeing as he is a politician!) a good summary of key economic developments. Obviously Swan is biased towards selling his own book, but I often get some useful information from it (suitably filtered for bias). This week's note is no exception.

Swan shows two graphs explaining why "the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression" has had not been felt strongly in Australia and why talking about concepts of economic vulnerability are so difficult!

Now the debate really is over why this occurred and what the major factor in this amazing outcome actually was: luck, good policy or China. While the right of the political spectrum argues that China is most important and that the GFC ands the global recession were really a North Atlantic phenomenon, the Left argues that government played the major role.

To downplay the real dangers to the Australian economy in 2007-08 is silly. Government in Australia played a major role not just in spending initiatives but by providing government guarantees to the financial sector. Equally it would be silly to argue that China hasn't play a major role since 2009.

What is definitely true is that a lot of things have gone right for Australia over the past 18-20 years, just as a lot of things went poorly for the previous 18-20 years . Government policy since 1983 has been important, especially in making the Australian economy more adaptable to external shocks. But it now needs to play a bigger role in distributing Australia's luck across society and extending it into the future.