Australia’s unemployment rate has now had a ‘3’ in front of it for 13 consecutive months.
Since February 2022, unemployment has ranged between 3.4% and 3.9%. In March 2023, it held steady at 3.5% for the second consecutive month, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Sometimes, the unemployment rate falls because people stop looking for work – an individual is no longer classified as unemployed if they give up on finding a job. However, in this case, the opposite has occurred: the share of adults who either have a job or are actively looking for one rose from 66.5% in February 2022 to 66.7% in March 2023.
So a higher percentage of adults are in the labour market, which is good news for employers who are struggling to find staff.
The main reason the Reserve Bank has aggressively increased the cash rate since May 2022 has been to reduce inflation by cooling the economy. Normally, that would trigger higher unemployment. But since the rate hikes started, the unemployment rate has fallen by 0.4 percentage points.
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