The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 3.5 per cent in June with employment increasing by 88,000 people and unemployment falling by 54,000.
This is the lowest unemployment rate since August 1974.
The unemployment rate continued to fall for men and women (both down 0.4 percentage points).
“The 3.4 per cent unemployment rate for women was the lowest since February 1974 and the 3.6 per cent rate for men was the lowest since May 1976,” said Bjorn Jarvis, head of statistics at the ABS.
“The large fall in the unemployment rate this month reflects more people than usual entering employment and also lower than usual numbers of employed people becoming unemployed. Together these flows reflect an increasingly tight labour market, with high demand for engaging and retaining workers, as well as ongoing labour shortages.”
The fall in unemployment through the pandemic has coincided with large increases in job vacancies (480,000 in May 2022). As a result, there was almost the same number of unemployed people in June 2022 (494,000 people) as vacant jobs.
“This equates to around one unemployed person per vacant job (1.0), compared with three times as many people before the start of the pandemic (3.1),” Mr Jarvis said.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive, Andrew McKellar, said the fall in unemployment is good news, but the gap between the number of unemployed people and job vacancies has narrowed to just 14,000, emphasising the severity of the jobs crisis.
“Australia’s skills shortage has gone from bad to worse, with the unemployment rate falling much faster than anticipated. Businesses are facing enormous pressures to recruit and retain local workers, but the reality is they’re running out of options,” he said.
“We are now heading into uncharted waters. A failure to act on Australia’s labour and skills crisis threatens to hold back our economic recovery.
“The increase in workforce participation is a positive sign, particularly the record highs achieved in female participation. In this tight labour market, we must do more to raise female participation through increased childcare support and paid parental leave.
“As a matter of urgency, we must reduce the barriers for people who want to work, ramp up low levels of permanent and temporary skilled migration, and drive investment in training to help abate the chronic workforce shortages across the economy.”
