The Missing Employment Figures Scam Post.

I thought i would republish a post, made recently, that fell into the blogger black hole. It is edited.

An interesting by-product of The Victorian Auditor Generals (State Investment in Major Events) report into the 'real value', to the state, of the Grand Prix, is an incidental challenge by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research (NIEIR), headed by Dr Peter Brain.
In particular, he drops a big bucket on the employment figures that the Federal and State governments gloat about. The following are the best bits from Attachment B2 , buried well into this report.

"The core problem for those wishing to use the actual unemployment rate as an indicator of full employment is that the actual unemployment rate cannot be used for this purpose. As any competent economist would know, the official unemployment rate is corrupted and under-estimates the actual unemployment rate, as NIEIR has highlighted over and over again. The reasons are straight forward.

The first is the tactic adopted by the then government in the face of the 1991 recession to shift as many people as possible from the unemployment rolls to other forms of working age social security support, namely disability pensions, training allowances, etc. This tactic has been maintained though with reducing vigour to this day.

The second strategy to reduce the measured unemployment rate is to encourage working age social security beneficiaries to seek a few hours of work a week. This has been the tactic favoured by the current administration. This reduces the unemployment rate because to be counted as employed in the labour force statistics a person has only to have worked for one hour or more a week, in some cases as unpaid employment.

The actual unemployment rate, therefore, cannot be used as an indicator of full employment because under the current circumstances the actual unemployment rate could indicate zero unemployment, while the actual effective unemployment rate was 100 per cent, simply because everybody was working one hour. Under the current circumstances, the only way of obtaining a correct estimate of the actual unemployment rate is to use social security working age beneficiary data and construct an unemployment series from these sources".

Wouldn't it be terrific to be living in Broadmeadows, on the dole, looking for work, when Costello comes on the tv, congratulating himself on the latest fab, employment figures? These are some of the closer to real current unemployment rate numbers, based on social security figures rather than from phone polls run by ABS . They have been grabbed from the provided contrary NIEIR report table, for some Melbourne suburbs.

Port Phillip (C) – West 8.9
Stonnington (C) – Prahran 6.5
Yarra (C) – North 13.5
Yarra (C) – Richmond 11.3
Brimbank (C) – Keilor 13.8
Brimbank (C) - Sunshine 21.7
Hobsons Bay (C) - Altona 13.3
Hobsons Bay (C) - Williamstown 10.5
Maribyrnong (C) 17.6
Moonee Valley (C) - Essendon 10.5
Moonee Valley (C) - West 9.6
Melton (S) – East 8.0
Melton (S) Bal 10.7
Wyndham (C) – North 9.6
Wyndham (C) - South 9.8
Wyndham (C) – West 10.4
Moreland (C) - Brunswick 12.5
Moreland (C) - Coburg 13.5
Moreland (C) – North 16.5
Banyule (C) - Heidelberg 10.2
Banyule (C) – North 7.7
Darebin (C) - Northcote 11.8
Darebin (C) – Preston 17.3
Hume (C) - Broadmeadows 18.4
Hume (C) - Craigieburn 13.1