Australia’s jobless rate has fallen to its lowest level since mid-2008, dropping to just 4 per cent in February as more than 121,000 people found full-time work across the country.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday reported unemployment edged down by 0.2 percentage points last month in news that puts fresh pressure on the Reserve Bank to reconsider the timing of its first interest rate rise.
The number of people unemployed fell by 18,500 to 563,300 to be almost 160,000 down on its pre-pandemic level.Credit:Louise Kennerley
It was driven by a 77,400 increase in the number of people in work. That increase was skewed towards full-time employment, which jumped by 121,900 to 9.2 million. Part-time employment edged down by 44,500, with the total share of employment in part-time work down to 31 per cent.
There are now 376,500 more people in work than at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
The number of people unemployed fell by 18,500 to 563,300 to be almost 160,000 down on its pre-pandemic level.
Youth unemployment dropped by 0.3 per cent in the month while there was a small fall in total underemployment.
ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said it was the lowest unemployment rate in more than a decade.
“This is the lowest unemployment rate since August 2008 and only the third time in the history of the monthly survey when unemployment was as low as 4 per cent,” he said.
It was also the lowest unemployment rate for women in nearly 50 years.
“The 3.8 per cent unemployment rate for women was the lowest since May 1974,” Mr Jarvis said.
But coronavirus continued to affect work hours over February, with higher than usual numbers of people working fewer or no hours because of sick leave or illness.
“The number of employed people working no hours over the entire week due to illness or sick leave was around 80 per cent higher than what we would usually see in February, having been around triple the usual level in January,” he said.
Across the states, unemployment fell by half a percentage point in NSW to 3.7 per cent while its participation rate jumped half a percentage point. In Victoria, unemployment lifted slightly to 4.1 per cent but total employment also grew. The lowest jobless rate in the country is in the ACT at just 3 per cent. Participation jumped by 0.8 percentage points in the nation’s capital.
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