Australian Job Advertisements Fall Record 44% on Year

By Jacob Greber

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Australian advertisements for job vacancies tumbled in March for an 11th month as employers scrapped hiring plans amid signs the economy has fallen into its first recession since 1991.

Jobs advertised in newspapers and on the Internet dropped 8.5 percent from February and a record 44.6 percent from a year earlier, according to an Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. report released in Melbourne today.

Today’s report suggests the unemployment rate will continue rising this year, after jumping to a four-year high of 5.2 percent in February. Companies including miner BHP Billiton Ltd. are firing workers as a global recession erodes demand for exports and threatens to push Australia’s economy into its first annual contraction in two decades.

“Sharply falling job ads are consistent with an extended period of labor market weakness that is likely to see the unemployment rate” exceed 8 percent next year, said Warren Hogan, head of economics at ANZ Bank in Sydney.

The Australian dollar traded at 72:02 U.S. cents at 11:34 a.m. in Sydney from 72:03 cents just before the report was released. The two-year government bond yield was unchanged at 2.94 percent.

Queensland and Western Australia, the states that were the biggest winners of a five-year surge in global demand for natural resources, are “experiencing the most extreme contraction in job advertising,” Hogan added.

Unemployment Rate

Newspaper job ads in Queensland have dropped 71 percent from a November 2007 peak, and Western Australia has declined 67 percent over the same period, today’s report showed.

National vacancies advertised in newspapers and on the Internet averaged 147,804 a week last month, the lowest number since April 2005.

Newspaper advertisements fell 6.6 percent to an average of 7,958 per week, after falling 25.2 percent in February. Internet notices slid 8.6 percent to 139,846, the ANZ Bank report said.

Employers probably cut 25,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 5.4 percent from 5.2 percent, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. Jobs figures will be released on April 9.

The Reserve Bank of Australia, which pared its overnight cash rate target by a record four percentage points between September and February, will leave the benchmark rate unchanged tomorrow at 3.25 percent, according to 14 of 23 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News last week.

To contact the reporter for this story: Jacob Greber in Sydney at jgreber@bloomberg.net