The ABS urgently needs to boost its sample of Queensland households for the Labour Force Survey so we don’t get weird month-to-month changes like we’ve seen lately. Pete Faulkner from Conus Consulting has a good post on today’s new data (Strong jobs data; QLD corrects after last month (as predicted)). Pete notes that the increase in the unemployment rate was a correction from last month’s odd decline associated with a sharp drop in labour force participation:

In QLD the unemployment rate has risen sharply to 5.8% (from 5.3%), although this will not have come as a surprise to anyone who read our post a month ago (see here) where we identified a highly suspect collapse in the Participation Rate. The sharp decline in June was indeed revised upwards (as we forecast) and has jumped back to more “usual” levels this month of 66.5. It is this increase in the Participation Rate which has seen such a sharp uptick in the unemployment rate despite a 6,200 increase in jobs in the State.

Public service job cuts (7,717 so far according to the Courier-Mail’s informative job cuts ticker) will obviously slow down employment growth a bit over the next few months.