Vacancies with a chunky drop
After declining by 3½ per cent in the May 2024 quarter, job vacancies fell by a chunky -5.2 per cent in the August 2024 quarter to a seasonally adjusted 329,900.
Job vacancies were down -17 per cent over the past year, and have dropped by a record -143,200 since the highs, for a drop of more than -30 per cent.
Vacancies are now at their lowest level since February 2021, and are apparently accelerating lower.
New South Wales and Victoria account for the most job vacancies, and both were down -17 per cent over the year, with Victoria looking to be copping the worst of it.
Western Australia and South Australia are also going backwards fast now, with only Queensland recording a quarterly increase in positions available.
It's still early days for this cycle, with the number of unemployed persons per job vacancy increasing from a record low of 1.08 to 1.9 persons this quarter.
Still historically low, then, but clearly heading higher now.
The key point is that the size of Australia's labour force has exploded from 13.7 million at the onset of the pandemic to 15.1 million today.
An extra 1.4 million persons in the labour force means that as a share of the total labour force job vacancies aren't nearly as high as they might first appear.
In fact, with redundancies accelerating the unemployment rate may be heading to 5 per cent in due course.
Supercharged immigration was how Canada wound up with an unemployment rate at 6.6 per cent, after all, while New Zealand is at 4.6 per cent and rising fast into nasty recessionary conditions.
Australia superficially looks to be in a much healthier position, but the warning signs are there.
