Where have all the jobs gone?

Over December and January Greater Perth joined Greater Adelaide in the unenviable position of having  an unemployment rate which has breached 7 per cent.

Smoothing the unemployment rate figures as an annual average shows that of the main capital cities only Perth is in an unemployment rate uptrend as the heady days of the resources boom recede.

Nationally annual employment growth has picked up a little over the past three months, albeit not by very much, with a shade over +90,000 positions added on a net basis for employment growth of +0.8 per cent.

Having been on a storming run in 2015, annual employment growth has slowed right up in Greater Sydney to +21,000, with only Greater Melbourne adding any meaningful figure to its workforce at +85,000.

 

In aggregate, in fact, the rest of Australia has added no net new employment at all over the year to January 2017, which is a rather underwhelming statistic to say the least!