Jobs and unemployment under the Abbott Government

Snapshot from Tony Abbott's press release The Coalition's Job Pledge.

On 18 September 2013 Tony Abbott and his merry band of right-wing ideologues formally took up the reins of federal government in Australia and began relentlessly talking down the Australian economy.

During that September the national unemployment rate stood at 5.6 per cent (seasonally adjusted) and the number of job advertisements was only 5% above the lowest level reached during the Global Financial Crisis:

By October unemployment stood at 5.7 percent, in November 5.8 per cent and in December it mercifully held at 5.8 per cent.

Come the new year and in January 2014 the national unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) jumped to 6 per cent, in February remained at 6 per cent, in March fell back to 5.8 per cent and stayed at that rate in April.

By the month of May, in which the Abbott Government released it first budget papers, the unemployment rate still held at 5.8 per cent, but the actual number of unemployed people had begun to rise again and job advertisements had fallen sharply by 5.6% m/m.  

In June the rate was back to 6 per cent and the number of unemployed people increased by 20,300 to 741,700.

This week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the July 2014 unemployment figures and the seasonally adjusted rate jumped to 6.4 per cent, with the number of unemployed persons rising by 43,700 to 789,000 and only an est. 142,600 job vacancies across the country:

Ten months have passed since Abbott was sworn in as prime minister and the first of those millions of jobs he promised are yet to surface - apparently jobs growth is not even keeping up with population growth.

The quiet desperation of the unemployed can be seen in the number of individuals vainly applying for the relatively small pool of jobs in 2013 - jobs for which employers believed most were not suitable:

Snapshot from Australian Government Dept of Employment Labour Market Research and Analysis Branch