Job surge boosts family finances

The appearance of  45,900 new jobs in June will put a lot of fresh money into Australian family budgets, even though more than half of those positions – 27,900  to be precise – were part time.

That result, recorded in the Statistician’s labour force figures for June will also represent a significant boost to the Federal government, if sustained, as means that the nation will have more taxpayers, too.

However, there is another figure, too, which should not be forgotten.

There are still almost 600,000 Australians out of work, a total of 598,400, to be precise.

That’s 110,500 more than there were, when the global financial crisis struck.

Australia’s unemployment rate remained virtually unchanged last month, after revisions,  at 5.1 per cent.

By international standards, this is a wonderful result.

The US unemployment rate, right now, is 9.5 per cent.

French unemployment is even higher at 9.9 per cent, while Canada has 8.1 per cent unemployment and British unemployment is 7.8 per cent.

The impact that Australia’s prosperous mining industries have had on the nation’s job market is evident in State by State figures.

Western Australia, where iron ore mines are booming, for example, now has an unemployment rate of just 4 per cent.

However, the unemployment rate in Australia’s main coal mining State of Queensland is still 5.3 per cent.

The comparable rate, for Australia’s two most heavily populated States, New South Wales and Victoria were 5.2 and 5.4 per cent respectively.

The full impact of last month’s job surge, of course, has yet to make its mark on consumer confidence in Australia.

And on the Roy Morgan measure, this fell by 1.1 per cent early this month.

That was based mainly on rise in the number of Australian families who reported that they are now worse off than they were a year ago.

However the Roy Morgan organisation also reported that consumer confidence in Australia is still 9 per cent higher than it was 12 months earlier.