As an Adelaide resume writer and employment expert, I know you won’t read this in the local Adelaide media but since May, the City of Churches has entered into a nasty recessionary spiral, as household spending plummets.
Yes, I know that ABS says it’s going up from a very flat base but it you’re standing on Rundle Mall, this story is the lived experience when buyers close their wallets and purses.
In per capita terms the Australian economy is going, backwards extending the national current record-long ‘per capita recession’ to nine straight quarters.
This has been caused by steep cost-of-living pressures with prices rising well ahead of incomes.
South Australian households’ real per capita disposable incomes fell by 2.2 per cent in 2023/24 after a substantial fall in 2022/23. People have slashed discretionary spending.
Across Australia, jobs on Seek saw a 5.6% year-on-year decline in May on both trend and a seasonally adjusted basis. Seek is not a very liable metric but the trend is right.
June, July and August can be quieter months for hiring staff as companies bed down their new budgets and evaluate their staffing needs.
Thumbs up for South Australia as it was the only state or territory where job ad volumes grew year-on-year (6.1%), due to increased demand for workers in the industrial and construction sectors.
While moderate global growth is expected to continue, there is a risk that the global economy will be undermined by tit-for-tat tariff trade measures.
The Australian economy is growing at its slowest pace since the recession of the early 1990s, leaving aside the unusual situation of the pandemic.
There is also some fear about how AI will effect jobs, especially in the private sector.
Artificial intelligence is expected to fundamentally transform the global workforce by 2050, according to reports from PwC, McKinsey, and the World Economic Forum.
Estimates suggest that up to 60% of current jobs will require significant adaptation due to AI. Automation and intelligent systems will become an integral part of the workplace but there is a lot of media spin around AI at the moment.
This weakness in private sector activity is in line with the pessimistic findings of the 2H 2024 Director Sentiment Index,conducted in September last year, which reported considerable pressures from the cost of living, inflation, interest rates and low productivity growth.
New Zealand and Europe are currently in a technical recession, born from massive global inflation and South Australia is not immune.
Look at the price of houses and apartments and your shopping basket.
So if you wonder why clothes, new cars and a raft of discretionary spending products and services are not moving, now you know why.
Will it get better? It will pick up in mid-September and through to Christmas.