Australian employment surged by the most in over 15 years in November and nudged the unemployment rate to a 19-month low, but so stunning was the result that it revived doubts about the reliability of the data.
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Full time employment rose by 41,600, and part-time jobs were up by 29,700.
Australia’s unemployment rate fell to 5.8 per cent in November, official figures show, easily beating expectations.
New South Wales added 50,300 jobs, signaling a surge in employment in parts of the economy not related to mining. Australia is in the midst of a sharp slowdown in mining investment that is hurting resource-rich states such as Western Australia most.
The ABS said in its report that the current group of people it surveys for its labour force report have a higher participation rate in the jobs market, which Mr Strickland said inflates the size of the jobs growth figure.
“Treat this data skeptically-real world evidence suggests improvement, not nirvana”, he said, adding technical quirks in the data collection appear to have boosted employment.
The total number of people with a job also rose 71,400 in November, building on a gain of over 56,000 the month before, which was the strongest two months of employment growth since January 1988.
It seems Australia’s labor market has stabilized over the past six months, taking pressure of Australia’s central bank to ease interest rates, JP Morgan economist Tom Kennedy said.
The ACT unemployment rate rose by 0.1 per cent in trend terms, the capital’s highest trend unemployment rate since 2001, despite the trend participation rate holding steady at 70.5 per cent.
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The latest figure of 5.8 per cent – the lowest reading since April 2014 – surprised the market, with the Australian dollar jumping nearly one U.S. cent to 73.32 USA cents after the data release.
