"The total number of people with jobs rose a whopping 121,000 to 11.704 million in August, official figures on Thursday show."

"jobs"?  That's full-time jobs?  38 hours per week?

Or, does "jobs" include casuals doing just 2 hours per week?

"There's no way this economy created 121,000 jobs in the month," Mr Hogan said.

Swagman wrote on Sep 11^th, 2014 at 1:16pm:

"jobs"?  That's full-time jobs?  38 hours per week?

Or, does "jobs" include casuals doing just 2 hours per week?

The west Australian newspaper never lets facts get in the way of ABS stats that clearly state unemployment is at a 10 year high under Abbott.

They get pretty excited about what looks like a first reduction which is still much higher unemployment than we have had for many years.

Remember the previous result was a lot worse - so this one looks better because it's not a lot worse, we recovered back to the previous poor result. Isn't it wonderful.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/11/us-australia-economy-employment-idUSKB...

Let's Have a Look.....


Australian employment surged by the most on record in August and far beyond the most optimistic forecast, on the face of it a stunningly strong report that should calm recent concerns about the health of the economy.




The local dollar AUD=D4 leaped and markets are virtually pricing out the chance of a rate cut as Thursday's data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed 121,000 jobs were created in August. That was the largest rise since the series began in 1978 and dwarfed expectations for a 12,000 increase.



The jobless rate also surprised by falling back to 6.1 percent, so reversing most of July's unexpected jump to 6.4 percent. while more people went looking for work as the participation rate jumped to a 16-month peak of 65.2 percent.



Analysts cautioned the series was notoriously volatile and carried a lot of statistical noise, but even then the scale of the gains could not be ignored.

?


"It's really an off-the scale result to get more than 100,000 jobs created against expectations of only about 10-15,000, and is clearly a very big upside surprise," said Stephen Walters, chief economist at JPMorgan.

!

"It's always a bit difficult to track what's really going on in the labour market just looking at employment on its own, but when you look at the unemployment rate it's actually come all the way back down to 6.1 percent which is where we were a few months ago."



July's spike in unemployment to a 12-year peak of 6.4 percent had caused a lot of hand-wringing at the time and much media talk of a sagging economy, and even recession.



Since then data has shown the economy grew a little faster than expected in the year to June at 3.1 percent, while retail sales and home building has been running firm.