Y ou didn’t vote for it, you weren’t even asked, but it was decided three years ago – mostly by those running the Reserve Bank – that Australia needed an extra 150,000 or so people to be unemployed. Back in 2022 Australia’s unemployment was 3.5%; last week the Bureau of Statistics announced it had reached 4.5% – roughly an extra 150,000 people out of work.

Goodbye full employment, welcome back the arbitrary higher level of people being out of a job for the good of the economy.

The figure was actually a shock to those in the RBA.

On 10 October, the governor of the Reserve Bank appeared before the Senate economics committee and told the senators that “we’ve seen the unemployment rate rise to about 4.2%”. Last week, the Minutes of the RBA’s most recent monetary policy meeting also n

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