ABS April survey shows employment growth amidst steady unemployment numbers
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed that April's employment numbers are steadying with about 33,700 jobs created last month but the unemployment rate remained crawling up at 5.4 percent as the workforce continues to balloon.
Apart from the jobs spawned in April, the ABS survey also showed that about 37,500 were also employed in extra full-time positions while another 3,900 were hired in part-time employments as economists predicted that job growth would remain slow for more months following the strong performance posted in the latter part of 2009.
About 200,000 works became available by the end of last year and the trend was sustained until the early months of 2010 as the unemployment rate slid by 5.2 percent in January and by April, workers' working hours were reduced by 0.5 percent amidst the rise in full-time employment.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) economist Felicity Emmett told Reuters that the ABS data pointed to a strong Australian economy and job market, adding that "we continue to expect that there will be further strengthening in employment over the next few months."
She said that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) must be happy to see that the rates are normalising at this time and "they are going to be happy to sit and wait for a couple of months to see how some of the domestic data play out."
The ABS figures reflected the actual employment landscape across the Australian economy and it is projecting of about 19,700 jobs loss and up to 87,100 jobs created on the other hand, which places the actual unemployment rate between 5.2 percent and 5.6 percent even as the April numbers were fixed at 5.3 percent.
Across the Australian states, Western Australia's unemployment rate declined by 4.6 percent in April as the number of people seeking work has been reduced while Queensland has seen a slight increase in unemployment with a spike of 5.6 percent in the same month.
In NSW, unemployment shot up by 5.8 percent in April while that in Victoria slid to 5.3 percent on the same month and coming from the 5.4 percent posted in March as the Northern Territory's numbers remained unmoved at 3.2 percent with less people competing for job in the market.
South Australia has seen an unemployment increase of up to 5.6 percent in April yet the number of those who are looking for work slid a bit while Tasmania saw a spike of up to 5.9 percent in the same month with ACT numbers steadying to as low as 3.3 percent, also in the same month.