Australia’s unemployment rate is sitting at a five-year high, and nearly 40,000 fewer people were employed in September.
The economy appears to have misunderstood the instruction to bring prices down. It’s started with employment.
The latest ABS figures put unemployment at 4.7 per cent.
There’s a wrinkle: August’s figure was revised upwards to the same rate. So the headline is less “sudden leap” and more “we were already standing higher than we thought”.
Employment fell by 39,300, while the number counted as unemployed rose by 8,900.
Those figures differ because people also move into and out of the labour force. Someone without work isn’t automatically counted as unemployed; they generally need to be available and actively looking.
Statistics: where even being jobless comes with eligibility criteria.
The detail is mixed. Full-time employment increased by 34,400, but part-time employment dropped by 73,700.
And the smoother trend measure showed employment still growing slightly. The ABS recommends that measure for understanding the underlying direction.
So one month doesn’t establish an economic disaster.
But it certainly deserves attention.
For households, losing income while bills remain high can turn a manageable budget into a nightly spreadsheet emergency.
For the Reserve Bank, weaker employment complicates decisions about interest rates. Financial markets reduced their bets on another increase after the figures.
That might sound reassuring to mortgage holders, but unemployment is an awful way to improve someone else’s interest-rate outlook.
My view? Policymakers need to explain how they’ll bring inflation down while protecting opportunities to work.
That means examining which industries are hiring, where hours are disappearing, and whether jobseekers can access useful training and support.
And politicians should resist treating every monthly number as either a victory parade or the apocalypse.
People need steady decisions, not competing press conferences pointing at the same graph.
Because you can revise last month’s statistics.
You can’t retrospectively pay last month’s rent with them.
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