The World’s Greatest Finance Minister, May 2nd, 2011:
“We created 750,000 jobs since we came to office when other nations shed millions of jobs, and we will create half a million more in the next two years.”
PM Julia Gillard, December 2nd, 2011:
“We are on track to create 300,000 new jobs over the next two years”
The latest Labour Force data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:
Employed Full-time Persons | Click to enlarge
Employed Part-time persons | Click to enlarge
Employed Total persons | Click to enlarge
Number of Full-time employed? Down 45,900.
Number of Part-time employed? Up 58,000.
Number of Employed persons? Up 12,200 (with allowance for rounding).
Since June.
2,440 per month.
At that rate of part-time “jobs created” (to replace Full-time jobs lost), it will take over 10 years for Julia to achieve her “300,000” jobs created. Assuming you believe that the government creates all the new jobs, with zero from the private sector.
It will take 18 years to reach Wayne’s promised “half a million more”.
It’s also worth noting the ABS statistic for just how many are “Unemployed, looking for full-time work”. That number has risen by 33,900 since June, the month following Wayne’s pre-budget promise.
And the number of persons in total who are “Unemployed” has risen by 38,100 over that time.
So essentially, part-time jobs are replacing full-time jobs. And at a rate way insufficient to meet the rise in total unemployed job-seekers (eg, retrenched full-time employees, school leavers, immigrants, refugees, retirees forced to look for work due having their superannuation “nest egg” decimated, etc).
Now, this is just the “seasonally adjusted fiddled” ABS data.
Some say that Australian government “official statistics” are about as believable as government statistics in other countries.
Like the USA, where “official” unemployment has allegedly just fallen to 8.6% … thanks to their simply not counting the millions of people who are unemployed but have given up looking. Alternate statistics researchers such as the venerable ShadowStats claim US unemployment is more like 22.5%:
Source: ShadowStats.com
In Australia, Roy Morgan research publishes an alternate measure of unemployment. And surprise surprise, it too consistently shows unemployment rates significantly higher than our government’s “official” statistics.
Here’s the latest Roy Morgan stats (emphasis added):
# In November Australia’s total unemployment as measured by Roy Morgan was 1,044,000, or 8.6% (unchanged in percentage terms, but up 18,000) from October 2011 and up 229,000 (up 1.7%) since November 2010 — Australia’s equal highest unemployment rate since March 2004 (8.8%). It is also the highest number of unemployed Australians for nearly a decade — since January 2002 (1,075,000).
# The Roy Morgan November 2011 ‘underemployed’* estimate was 938,000 (7.7%), up 90,000 (0.6%) from October 2011, and up 126,000 (0.9%) since November 2010.
# In total in November 2011 an estimated 1,982,000 (16.3%) of Australians were unemployed or ‘underemployed.’ This is up 108,000 (0.6%) on October 2011 and up 355,000 (2.6%) since November 2010.
# The latest Roy Morgan unemployment estimate is 3.4% above the 5.2% currently quoted by the ABS for October 2011 — this is the equal largest gap since December 2005 (8.5% Roy Morgan cf. 5.1% ABS).
Who to believe?
You decide.
Just remember the indignant words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, in an episode of the classic BBC satire Yes Prime Minister titled “The Smoke Screen”:
“They’re government statis…. they’re facts”
UPDATE:
For any reader questioning the “Global Cooling” reference, I have no interest in pointing you to the many websites where you can find evidence that the world has experienced a slight cooling over the past decade. Instead, in keeping with Thursday’s reference to The Golden Rule (ie, “Follow The Money”), I give you instead the opening paragraph of the official press release for the 2010 Bilderberg Meeting of the world’s ‘elite’ … and suggest you think about it:
Click to enlarge
Barnaby Is Right 
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