Australia’s jobless rate steady with more in full-time work – but fewer people are looking

The nation’s job market withstood the early hit from the war in Iran, with unemployment steady through March at 4.3 per cent.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released this morning showed that 52,500 full-time jobs were created last month, offset by a 34,700 fall in part-time positions.

The jobless rate would have increased but for a 0.1 percentage point drop in the participation rate that measures the number of people in work or looking for it.

The bureau’s head of labour statistics, Sean Crick, noted that the number of people out of work fell by 4000.

He said while there was a drop in part-time workers, the hours worked part-time increased by 0.6 per cent.

“This meant that on average, a person working part-time worked 1.4 per cent more hours in March than they did in February,” he said.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is in Washington for a round of International Monetary Fund meetings, said the figures proved the economy was in a good position before the war.

“This is a dangerous time for the global economy, but these figures confirm we still have low unemployment and that’s a good thing,” he said.

“All of the global economic uncertainty we are seeing in the world right now is informing our thinking ahead of next month’s Budget, but these figures show we have strong economic foundations to confront the challenges ahead.”

There was little movement at the state and territory level.

Unemployment in NSW, the nation’s largest job market, increased by 0.2 percentage points to 4.3 per cent, while it lifted by 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 per cent in Victoria.

There was a sharp fall in Queensland, by 0.7 percentage points, to the nation’s lowest jobless rate of 3.7 per cent, while it lifted by a similar amount in the ACT where unemployment jumped to 4.2 per cent.

The figures are one of the last pieces of the economic jigsaw for the Reserve Bank, which meets on May 4-5. Financial markets put the chance of an interest rate increase at that meeting at 59 per cent.

Prominent independent economist Saul Eslake, writing for this masthead on Thursday, warned that if the RBA lifts rates at next month’s meeting, on top of the huge increase in fuel prices caused by the war in Iran, it would hurt the national economy.

“Raising interest rates in response to the first-round impact of higher fuel prices on inflation would be doubling up – and increasing the risk of a recession,” he said.

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