From today s paper in The AGE, some key paragraphs......
790000 are listed as out of work, how many more do not show up in this number, aka being on other benefits or not entitled...I assume is double the number...
""""That's very good news but it hasn’t made much difference to the unemployment rate. The latest figures put the rate at 5.6 per cent, exactly what it was six months ago.
So what’s going on? The Reserve Bank puts it this way: employment growth has been “strong enough to absorb growth in the working-age population, although not high enough to reduce the unemployment rate further”."""
""" When you have a growing population like ours you need be hitting record levels all the time just to keep up – that goes for jobs as well as spending on things like infrastructure and social services."""
"hese days, politicians don’t talk much about unemployment.
When I searched the flurry of transcripts for media interviews and speeches done by Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten so far this month the words "unemployment" or “unemployed” never appeared.
And it's not just politicians – journalists don’t often ask about unemployment.
Somehow those 730,000 Australians without a job seem to have slipped down the political agenda.
That’s a pity because there are some worrying trends buried in the unemployment numbers.
The latest trend figures showed 94,000 Australians have been out of work for two years or more, the highest in 18 years.
Also, there has been a sustained rise in the share of jobless Australians who are experiencing long-term unemployment – those who are out of work for 12 months or more.
In early 2009, just before the economy felt the effects of the global financial crisis, one in eight jobless Australians had been unemployed for a year or more. Now that share has risen to about one in every four.
There’s significant human cost behind these statistics because unemployment is much more than an economic issue.
Many studies have drawn attention to the misery and unhappiness associated with being out of work.
Long-term unemployment is especially damaging.
The Fairfax-Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index estimates the economic cost of long-term unemployment was $13.6 billion last year.
Even so, these thorny challenges exposed each month in our official jobs figures rarely figure in political debate.
With global growth the strongest it has been in sometime Australia is lagging many advanced country counterparts when it comes to unemployment.
The United States (4.1 per cent) Britain (4.3), New Zealand (4.5) and Germany (3.6) all have unemployment rates well below ours.
We know the Australian economy can produce much lower rates of unemployment.
The trend rate of unemployment was 4.5 per cent or lower for most of 2007 and 2008, prior to the global financial crisis.
One key figure who does still talk a lot about unemployment is the Reserve Bank Governor, Philip Lowe. One of the bank’s mandates is “the maintenance of full employment in Australia.”"""
“Immigration is a no-brainer, you know that it is not a problem when the unemployment rate is continuing to trend down," he said.
Employment rose every month in a calendar year for the first time in four decades in 2017 after the economy added almost 400,000 jobs.
NSW finished the year on the precipice of the natural rate of unemployment at 4.8 per cent while Victoria hit 6.1 per cent.
There are only two Labor-held areas identified by the report as having up to 70 per cent population growth owing to immigration, they belong to Anthony Albanese in Sydney’s inner-west and Julie Owens in Parramatta.
Immigrants consume less in government services than they pay in tax, making the federal government billions over their lifetimes, a landmark Treasury analysis has found, even when their expensive final years of life are taken into account.
But the research, published by Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs, has come under fire from some population experts who believe it glosses over the link between migration and higher home prices, congestion, and strain on the environment.
The landmark study found in total, permanent skilled migrants deliver the federal government a profit of $6.9 billion over their lifetimes, temporary skilled migrants a profit of $3.9 billion, and family stream migrants $1.6 billion.
