Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Brockman for the question. The labour force figures have been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today in relation to May 2021. What we have seen today is as follows: the unemployment rate has decreased to 5.1 per cent; the participation rate, colleagues, has actually increased to 66.2 per cent—so Australians are saying, 'I'm out there and I'm ready, willing and able to undertake work'; employment itself is now at a record high in Australia, at 13,125,100; the employment-to-population ratio has itself increased to 62.8 per cent; underemployment, which we often talk about in this chamber, has actually decreased to 7.4 per cent; and the monthly hours worked for May increased by 25 million hours.

What we saw in the release of the labour force statistics today was that employment in the month of May increased by 115,200. That exceeded all market expectations. There are now more than 13.1 million Australians in work. That is a record number of Australians in employment and, when you look at where we were 12 months ago, that is a good thing—that we can stand here 12 months later and say that we have a record number of Australians in employment. What it actually means is that the level of employment is now 130,300 above the pre-COVID level that was recorded in March 2020. In fact, it's now 987,200 or 8.1 per cent higher than the trough in the labour market recorded in May 2020. Pleasingly, in terms of full-time job creation, the majority of jobs created in May were full-time jobs.