Republic calls BS as ‘111,000’ people find ‘work’

The Australian Bureau of Statistics today reported the national jobless rate had dropped to 6.8 per cent from 7.5 per cent, adding 110,00 jobs in the last month.

That’s back to where it was in July 2018, during one of the greatest recessions in Australia’s history. This is absolute bullshit.

You can read more on an article I wrote about the ABS employment methodology here: https://indaily.com.au/opinion/2018/08/24/the-ghosts-in-the-unemployment-figures/

Of the jobs created, 74,800 were part-time positions and casual positions. And despite the large jump in jobs, total hours worked only lifted by 0.1 per cent. How can that be?

In Victoria, the jobless rate only moved up to 7.1 per cent from 6.8 per cent. Absolute and utter bullshit.

Multiple sections of the Australian economy including the tertiary education sector, hospitality, tourism, airlines and many more, have ground to a halt.

In real terms, two million people have been thrown out of work and that’s not including the knock-on through the supply chains. Australia’s true unemployment rate is around 16-17 per cent.

The ABS counts unemployed people as, “all persons aged 15 years and over who were not employed during the reference week and had actively looked for work and were available to work or were waiting to start a new job.”

According to the ABS, people are ’employed’ if they worked one hour or more in the reference week. This outdated definition fails to capture reality.

In NSW, the nation’s biggest jobs market, the jobless rate dropped to 6.7 per cent from 7.2 per cent. Laughable.

The Northern Territory’s jobless rate fell to 4.2 per cent from 7.5 per cent, in Western Australia it fell to 7 per cent from 8.3 per cent while in Queensland it dropped to 7.5 per cent from 8.8 per cent. Comedic and dangerous.

Australia needs a far better and more valid system to measure true and real unemployment.

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