Nearly 1000 jobs created in the NT in December, as construction sector picks up

NEARLY a thousand Territorians picked up work in December, a majority of them men, in signs male-dominated industries like construction are bouncing back in the NT.

NEARLY a thousand Territorians picked up work in December, a majority of them men, in signs male-dominated industries like construction are bouncing back in the NT.

The unemployment rate fell 0.5 per cent between November and December on seasonally adjusted terms, just 0.1 per cent off the Territory’s 5.5 per cent pre-coronavirus employment rate in March 2020.

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A majority of the 900 Territorians who gained employment in December were men, data that could reflect the uptick in the construction sector in the NT.

Master Builders NT chief executive Dave Malone said government stimulus packages including HomeBuilder, capital works programs and Defence-related infrastructure had sparked recovery for the pandemic-hit industry in the last quarter of 2020.

Building business owners Bec Hammet from SH Build and Phillip Hoare from Multibuild Homes both said they had taken more people on in the last few months to cope with a surging workload.

Chief Minister Michael Gunner said the Territory was “blowing the economists’ predictions out of the water”.

The unemployment rate in the NT remains lower than the national average of 6.6 per cent, a characteristic NT Treasury has attributed to the Territory’s “reliance on interstate and overseas workers to meet workforce requirements associated with major projects and other economic activity”.

Charlotte Webb now works as a loans processor at Yes Money. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford

Charlotte Webb, a newly hired loans processor at Darwin brokerage Yes Money, managed to secure the job prior to her family’s decision to relocate to the NT.

“I looked at it as such a building boom up here with all the (home related) grants,” she said.

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The Australian Bureau of Statistics data also shows the NT workforce has shrunk by 5 per cent, or 7400 people, since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.

Nationally, 50,000 jobs were added in the final weeks of the year.

The number of employed workers is still down 63,900, or 0.5 per cent, on the same time last year.