Terry McCrann: ABS jobs data out of date when you consider Victoria’s destruction
The “fake” jobless numbers from the ABS weren’t good news, unless you define good as being anywhere better than dreadful, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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It’s still all — disastrously and depressingly — about Victoria. The devastation wreaked by the criminal negligence and stunning incompetence of the Andrews state Labor government on Victoria and on its 6.5 million incarcerated citizens is bad enough.
But by keeping one quarter of the national economy locked in its worst recession for nearly 100 years, through to at least the end of November and quite probably into 2021 as well, Victoria is also acting as a great dead weight on the rest of the country.
True, the other states, led by WA and Queensland at opposite ends of the nation, are doing their own bit to cripple their own economies and damage what we used to think of as a unified nation, with their own ridiculous border closures.
But the main perpetrator of serious and permanent harm not only to the economy but actual individual Australians in their hundreds of thousands is Victoria and the megalomaniac otherwise known as the Premier.
The fake jobless numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics were not good numbers, unless you define “good” as anywhere better than dreadful.
They were also out of date both statistically and in terms of what’s happening in Victoria — correction, what is being done to Victoria and being done to Victoria by its own government. And so, how that has fed and will continue to feed corrosively into the rest of Australia.
Between February and May around 900,000 Australians lost their jobs according to the ABS. That was around one in every 12 people employed in the private sector.
In the next three months the number of jobs increased by a total of about 560,000. So we were still down around 340,000 jobs — at least, that is, on the ABS’s dodgy figures.
More than half of those losses — around 180,000 — are in Victoria.
But, and it is a stunningly important but, none of this includes the 3 million-plus — more than one in every four workers in the private sector — who are “employed” under JobKeeper.
Now, obviously, not all of them would have been sacked but for JobKeeper — which is the taxpayer not just effectively but actually paying their wages and salaries. But many of them would have been.
Indeed, we are going to “find out” just how many, as JobKeeper is progressively wound back from the end of this month and terminates — at least, that’s the current plan — at the end of March.
Now it’s also important to understand that these ABS figures, such as they dodgily are anyway, are way out of date. They are for the first two weeks of August.
That would be out of date in any month, but they have been rendered even more crucially and cruelly out of date by Victoria’s megalomaniac Premier throwing 6.5 million citizens into home imprisonment from early August.
We have to turn to the, what I now describe as the official, figures from Roy Morgan Research to see the early devastating impact of Victoria’s Lockdown Version 3.0 through August — not just on Victoria but the rest of the country as well.
The ABS figures showed jobs in Australia increasing by 111,000 — but falling by 42,000 in Victoria, the only state or territory where they did — over the month to early August.
The more up to date — and, more accurate — Morgan figures showed the national jobs number falling by 89,000 over the month.
That points to a likely sharp decline in the number of at least Victorian jobs through the second half of August and into — and indeed, through — home-imprisonment September.
Another important and disturbing point is that virtually all those new jobs identified by the ABS into August were actually “non employees”.
What does that mean? Well, it tells us they weren’t employees — most probably most of them were self-employed in categories like deliveries.
At least these people did get jobs, but it does not signal a normal, healthy, recovering economy.
The ABS tells us that the national jobless rate in (early) August supposedly fell to 6.8 per cent. It stuck with its policy of broadcasting that utterly fake number at the top of its homepage.
Morgan told us that its estimate of the jobless number in August was almost exactly double the ABS figure and the real jobless rate was 13.8 per cent.
The ABS does not count those who have given up looking for work.
So, to the ABS, all those people who used to work in hospitality and really didn’t see much prospect of getting a job right now in what were formerly known as restaurants, bars and cafes in Victoria aren’t really jobless. Just resting.
CHAIRMAN DAN RESHAPES STATE
Earth to Bill Kelty: our beloved Great Leader, Chairman — sorry, Premier — Dan has already had his “magic opportunity” to reshape the state of Victoria.
He’s used it to “reshape” the state into an economic disaster zone, modelled on downtown Berlin circa 1945.
Now Kelty was being quoted in another newspaper. He went on to state that using increased government debt could help deliver generational change to Melbourne and Victoria.
He is certainly right about that — more right than he appreciates. The good state of Victoria is certainly going to get (oodles) more debt — the gross figure will zoom past $100bn; before any of the fancy spending programs that Kelty was envisaging.
And boy are we going to get “generational change”. Whole generations of people are being left very changed: bruised and battered.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: ABS jobs data out of date when you consider Victoria’s destruction