03:37
The ABS, as you might have guessed, are the last people to fall for “gotcha” questions from journalists or anybody else.
Given the sensitivity around what the jobless rate is, and whether it would this time be “the lowest since the 1970s” as the Morrison government initially wrongly claimed a month ago when the February labour force numbers dropped, we thought it best to ask the statisticians for a “non-rounded” figures for the jobless rate.
Answer – and we kid you not – is that the March unemployment rate (cue: long drum roll) was:
3.9542384% *
Got that, Albo, Scomo, or another “mo”?
Let’s see who is the first reporter to ask “what’s the jobless rate”, and also if anybody gets the right answer?
With February 2008 coming at a (partly rounded) 3.981%, we can now safely say we have a figure that’s not been smaller since 1974, when the ABS released data on a quarterly basis.
(* We should add the numbers are at the start and end of the day only estimates, and in this case, the ABS also noted they had a bit of surveying problems because of massive flooding in northern NSW and Queensland.)
02:42
Australia’s unemployment rate has landed for March, and it’s unchanged from the previous month at 4.0%.
The economy added 17,900 jobs but, interestingly, the number of hours worked fell by 10 million, so not all arrows were pointed upwards.
Peter Hannam
(@p_hannam)To the disappointment perhaps of a few, the March jobless rate has come in unchanged for the month at 4.0% according to the ABS: https://t.co/3UTaM08fnh pic.twitter.com/YiycThC8xY
The jobless rate, of course, was what Labor leader Anthony Albanese stumbled on at the start of the week.
As Bjorn Jarvis, head of labour statistics at the ABS, said:
“4.0% is the lowest the unemployment rate has been in the monthly survey. Lower rates were seen in the series before November 1974, when the survey was quarterly.”
“The unemployment rate for women fell from 3.8% to 3.7%, the lowest it has been since May 1974. It remained at 4.2% for men, its second lowest level since November 2008 and just above the rate from December 2021 of 4.1%,” Jarvis said.
More to come soon …
Updated
02:14
It’s a fair bet that after 11.30am AEST today, Anthony Albanese is going to be briefed on what the March jobless rate comes in at, if he’s not watching the ABS website too.
Of course, probably every politician and pundit in the country will be taking a peek.
As we previewed yesterday, “the market consensus” is expecting a 3.x% number for the unemployment, with 3.9% the likely figure.
But a jump or drop in the participation rate may nudge things either way.
For what it’s worth, the February jobless rate was 4.042%, so the ABS told us when we asked nicely, which made that reading the lowest since August 2008 (4.016%), while there was technically a “3” reading in February of that year, at 3.981% for stat nerds.
Anyway, a clean 3.9% will have the ABS dusting off quarterly readings from the mid-70s.
Mind you, the RBA will be watching closely too, given its board also has a meeting on 3 May to consider what to do with the cash rate.
Meanwhile, as RateCity.com has noted today, two more of the big four banks, Westpac and ANZ, have lifted their fixed rates again today.
For Westpac, it’s the second increase in a week, after increasing fixed rates on 7 April. (Not all of its rates have gone up though, with the one-year fixed rate cut.)
ANZ has lifted its one- to five-year fixed rates by as much as 0.60 percentage points.
Fair to say those moves fit in the “more to come” category.
Updated