Australia: Labour market data mixed - ING

Rob Carnell, Chief Economist at ING explains that Australia’s labour market data was mixed but this is mainly statistical noise and the trend improvement is still in place.

Key Quotes

“We were not at all surprised by the latest Australian employment release. Both the full time and part-time jobs movements over recent months looked long overdue for a correction, and duly delivered. The full time employment change drifted back for a small negative (-20.3K) change, whilst part-time jobs virtually reversed the previous month’s fall with a 48.2K increase.”

“Whilst the magnitudes of these changes were slightly different to what we had envisioned, the net result was close to our 30K employment growth forecast for July (27.9K).”

“We view the latest figures as no more than statistical noise. And having got these corrections out of the way, we expect the full time jobs growth to take over the heavy lifting in coming months, and part time employment to soften.”

“The unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.6%, and though we are likely to see fluctuations both sides of this figure on the underlying volatility of the factors going into this figure, rising participation rates and substitution of part-time for full time employment will likely keep the unemployment rate fairly steady on a trend basis over the rest of the year.”