Doug Henwood wrote: > Hey Oz-based PEN-Lers, what's up with this?
Aren't we on first-name terms any more, Doug? > I thought you were all bearish. Hell no! Australian commentators have been nauseatingly smug about their precious numbers for months. I'm the only out'n'out fruitcake bear I know. But a few from the sane mainstream do discern strange ambiguities, like the Sydney Morning Herald, who published the following yesterday: Unemployment up 7 per cent Employment Minister Tony Abbott said today trend employment was at its highest level ever despite new figures showing the jobless rate jumped to seven per cent in January. Mr Abbott said the seasonally adjusted figures were volatile and could be influenced by changing seasonal employment patterns. "In trend terms, employment has been increasing since December 2000 and is at the highest level ever recorded," he said in a statement. But economists were today reassessing the jobs market after both employment numbers and the unemployment rate rose much higher than expected. The official unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, rose to 7.0 per cent for January from December's 6.7 per cent, according to the labour force data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Economists had expected it to rise to about 6.9 per cent. Much more surprising was a surge in jobs numbers ten times that expected, with the number of workers up by 101,800 to 9.280 million, adjusted - well beyond the predicted increase of about 10,000. The rise in both employment and unemployment was explained by a rise in the overall workforce participation rate in Australia - up to 64.2 per cent from 63.4 per cent. Commonwealth Bank chief economist Michael Blythe said his reaction to the data was "wow". He said there had been an "unbelievably" large rise in employment. "Clearly the broader market is not as strong as those jobs numbers suggest, nor is it as weak as the unemployment rate suggests," Mr Blythe said. "We're on track for modest growth in employment." Analysts had previously predicted the unemployment rate to rise to the low seven's before dropping back by the middle of the year. But Mr Blythe said they might have to rethink that timing, with a fall in the rate now likely to come sooner. "It's a pretty safe bet that it will," he said.
