Australian job advertising declines through June

Posted by Simon Day on July 6, 2009 at 12:36 PM

Total Australian job advertising in major daily newspapers and online fell 6.7 percent in June compared to May, The Australian reported Monday. According the ANZ Advertisements Series job advertising came in at a weekly average of 127,346 for June.

Annually, this represents a 51.4 percent year-to-year decline and is the 14th consecutive month that the number of job advertisements has fallen. May had induced false hope in the labor market with just a 0.2 percent decline.

June suffered on the back of the big decline in Internet advertising, which fell 7.2 percent. This was a yearly decline of 51.5 percent, the weakest year-to-year figure since the series began in 1998.

Job advertising in newspapers was up 0.9 percent but registered a 50.7 percent decline from a year earlier.

ANZ head of Australian economics Warren Hogan said the results reflected a continued rise in unemployment.

"Just about all leading indicators of employment, including business surveys and the ANZ Job Ads series, point to declining employment levels over the second half of the year," Mr Hogan said.

Horgan said he expected Australian unemployment to have reached 5.9 percent, up from 5.7 percent with the loss of further 32,000 jobs, when Australian Bureau of Statistics releases labor force data for June on Thursday.