Thousands of Australians lost their jobs in December, underscoring what experts said could be the biggest loss the local economy had seen in the past 20 years.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), close to 30,000 employees were given the boot just before Christmas time last year while another 53,700 workers lost their job slots, also in the same period.

However, the ranks of full-time employees swelled by 24,500 in the same month, roughly cushioning the impact of the losses that came as surprise to many economists, who had earlier projected that the holiday season would have created additional 10,000 jobs, at least.

ABS noted that the biggest decline so far was recorded in Victoria, but according to The Herald Sun, the state's jobless rate improved from 5.5 percent to 5.2 percent as the festivities in month saw lesser number of job applicants.

The new job data was released following the federal government's latest assessment that more Australians will be out of work of the crisis in Europe will not improve any sooner.

"There is a tough year ahead of us in Australia (with) big challenges in the global economy, which will inevitably impact on our economy," the Herald Sun reported Acting Treasurer Bill Shorten as saying earlier this week.

It appears too that many business operators were feeling the crunch and have made adjustments to soften the impact of the challenges to their businesses.

Instead of looking for new hires, employers were asking their staff to turn in extra hours as the total number of working hours in the month rose by 0.3 percent, according to supplemental data supplied by CommSec.

The spike signaled the underlying reality that businesses were hard-pressed to meet to their targets with dwindling resources to upgrade their workforce.

In some cases, "employers asked staff to work longer hours rather than taking on new workers," CommSec chief economist Craig James told the Herald Sun.

But in the end, a number of businesses were forced to implement retrenchment and let go of workers in the same period, James said, paving the way for a likely jobless rate hike of 5.7 percent for 2012.