Crazy jobless data hides recession reality

The latest ABS jobs figures are way off. The reality is we are smack in the middle of our second wave recession and two premiers control how long and how bad it will be.

Australia is smack in the middle of its second wave recession.

In a crazy, crazy 18 months – and counting – of lies, damned lies and, well, statistics, the lowest official jobless rate in 12 years has to be just about the craziest of them all.

Only 4.6 per cent of us are – to say again, officially - out of work: break out the champagne and make it the real Frenchie stuff!

Heck, we can afford it – just put it on the national credit card with the other $300bn or so, topping $12,000 for every single Australian, that’s already been borrowed and splurged by governments in this new age of Covid.

Well, the more accurate and more meaningful Roy Morgan Research data had already told us two weeks ago that the real jobless rate in July was 9.7 per cent – more than double that official ABS number.

Morgan also told us that a further 9.1 per cent were underemployed – nearly one-in-every five workers was either unemployed or underemployed.

The ABS has a much more comforting story. Yes, it says 8.3 per cent of workers were underemployed – that’s to say, they wanted to work more hours but couldn’t.

But therefore, ‘only’ 12.9 per cent of workers in total – just one-in-eight – were either officially unemployed or underemployed.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg at a press conference on August 19, 2021. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Take your pick, between the ABS’s comforting numbers or the Morgan real ones.

The ABS has always counted you as employed and therefore not in the jobless numbers if you worked just a single hour in a week. It now also counts you as employed if you worked zero hours – under JobKeeper Version 2.3.

The ABS data covers only the first two weeks of the previous month, in this case obviously July.

That regular bit means it’s always out of date; but this time, boy it is really dated.

The timing caught Victoria – one quarter of the national economy and of the jobs – ‘between’ Chairman Dan lockdowns, when things were relatively ‘booming’ in that state.

That’s of course, ‘booming” in the same way you feel so great when you stop banging your head against a brick wall.

Specifically, it caught Victoria just before not this current lockdown, but the previous one, Lockdown 5.0 – the “go early, go hard”, short sharp, lockdown that actually turned out to be exactly that.

Victoria then of course spent a few days in economic and literal freedom, only to be snapped straight back into Lockdown 6.0: a “go early, go hard”, short sharp lockdown, which is proving to certainly be very hard but not very short.

As Treasurer Frydenberg noted in his irresistible press conference on the numbers, some 230k NSW workers had gone from normal employment to zero-hour jobs, passing so to speak, 170k Victorian workers, going the other way.

Australia’s unemployment rate was 4.6 per cent in July. Picture: Saeed KHAN/AFP

His presentation, was a curious mix of retrained boasting about the lowest official jobless rate in 12 years, lower than any of his immediate Liberal predecessor treasurers had achieved (that’s my observation not his explicit claim, by the bye) and lament that it was already just historical statistical dust.

Self-evidently, the numbers do not pick up the damage done by both Victoria’s lockdown 5.0 and now Lockdown 6.0, running tall through August, at least.

Nor do they really pick up the damage from NSW’s lockdown, measuring back when only Sydney was in lockdown, in light lockdown, and when most employers were clinging to the naïve idea that Premier Berejiklian would only countenance a short lockdown.

It’s pointless trying to guess where the dodgy ABS numbers will go. Morgan more reliably suggests the jobless rate is already above 10 per cent and headed higher, with over 55 percent of the economy in extended and even unending lockdown.

I repeat: we are smack in the middle of our second wave recession. Two premiers control how long and how bad it will be.

Originally published as Crazy jobless data hides recession reality