Australia unemployment rate tumbles to lowest level since mid-2008

Sarah Smith, the public affairs manager for health insurance at Bupa, had her second child at the start of the pandemic. Childcare costs and a lack of family support in Melbourne meant she worked four days a week prior to taking maternity leave.

But she’s been able to go back to full-time hours since September thanks to changes to government childcare subsidies and Bupa’s flexible hybrid work model, which allows her to work from home three days a week and provides the technology and equipment to assist that.

“We just do it ourselves, we’re on our own, so the whole thing with Bupa and hybrid working is so important – I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it,” she said.

Ms Smith, who lives about 50 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD in Officer, said the flexibility, particularly around later starts or doing some work in the evening if needed to work around daycare, has taken one more burden off her shoulders.

“Although the mum guilt never goes away and you always feel like you could be doing more, this work environment has allowed me to have less of that commuting time, allows me to do my job better, and I don’t feel like I’m falling behind in my career.”

Nicole Finch is a single parent in Sydney who rejoined the workforce full-time last year. The business development manager took a nine-month break in mid-2020 before starting a new job in February.

“With the lockdowns, I just had a break to be with my son,” she said. “It was the best to spend quality time with my son, not to be always rushing in the morning.”

Ms Finch said she enjoys juggling caring for her seven-year-old son and pursuing her career.

“I think it’s good to keep your mind active and busy and always be building your career. Women get very wrapped up in raising our children, but it’s also important to build our career and have financial stability,” she said.

Ms Finch said her job flexibility means she can still drop-off and pick-up her son from school, and she finds creative ways to complete her full-time hours by working while he’s doing extracurricular activities.

The figures, collated before the recent floods across the east coast, showed unemployment in NSW at a record low of 3.7 per cent. In Victoria, while unemployment lifted slightly to 4.1 per cent, this was due to a record high participation rate in the state of 67.1 per cent.

A record 900,000 Victorian women are in full time work.

Youth unemployment dropped by 0.3 per cent in the month while there was a small fall in total underemployment.

Speaking from Perth, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Thursday’s jobs figures showed Australia had pulled through the pandemic with strength.

“We’ve got more people in work today of working age than at any other time of records for jobs in this country,” he said.

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“We’ve had greater employment growth in this country through the pandemic than any of the G7 countries, the most advanced economies of the world. ”

Mr Morrison told reporters he was five years old the last time the unemployment rate hit 4 per cent, in 1974. But the rate actually dipped under 4 per cent in 2008.

“This isn’t the lowest unemployment rate since Scott Morrison was five, it’s the lowest unemployment rate since the last Labor government,” Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers said.

Westpac senior economist Justin Smirk said if there was a real chance unemployment could fall well below 3.8 per cent which the federal Treasury and Reserve Bank are expecting.

He said the female participation rate – already at a record high of 62.4 per cent – would likely have to climb to 65.5 per cent to provide the workers needed to keep the economy ticking over.

The Commonwealth Bank’s head of Australian economics, Gareth Aird, said unemployment was now at the point it would put upward pressure on overall inflation which is already at 3.5 per cent.

He said it with the next inflation report, due in late April, likely to show a further upward shift in price pressure, the Reserve Bank was likely to start lifting interest rates at its June meeting.