The unemployment rate dropped to a better than expected 5.8% in February from 6.4% at the start of the year after 89,000 new jobs were created in the month.
Labour force data for last month from the Australian Bureau of Statistics was in fact far better than the 6.3% estimate in market forecasts which also had predicted 30,000 new jobs for the month.
While unemployment fell 70,000 people to 805,200, compared to 698,200 in the same month of 2020 and the number of those employed topped 13 million (as it did in February 2020), the unemployment rate of 5.8% was still well above the 5.1% of the same month.
Underemployment, however, rose from 8.1% to 8.5% – which is about its pre-pandemic level.
Unemployment is now back to a level last seen in early 2017!
Bjorn Jarvis, head of labour statistics at the ABS, said Thursday’s data showed continued recovery in the labour market into February, particularly for women.
“The strong employment growth this month saw employment rise above 13 million people, and was 4,000 people higher than March 2020,” he said in a statement with the labour force data.
“Full-time employment increased by 89,000 people, of which 69,000 were women. Female full-time employment was 1.8 per cent higher than March 2020, while male full-time employment was 0.8 per cent below.”
Youth unemployment dropped by 1.1 percentage points but at 12.9 per cent is still half a percentage point higher over the past 12 months.
Victoria’s jobless rate fell by 0.7 percentage points. It and NSW now have the same unemployment rate of 5.6 per cent.
There were falls in unemployment in every state and territory, with the biggest drop in Queensland, where it fell 0.8 percentage points to 6.1 per cent. The lowest jobless rate is in the ACT at 4.1 per cent.
The under-employment rate lifted by 0.3 percentage points to 8.4%, pointing to ongoing spare capacity in the labour market (which continues to worry the RBA).
Victoria’s under-employment rate is at 9.1% while in NSW it was 8.1% last month.
The data also pre-dates the end of the JobKeeper wage subsidy, which finishes on March 28.
Analysts, Treasury and the Reserve Bank think that once it ends there is likely to be a lift in the unemployment rate but that won’t become clear until May or June.
