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Unemployment Rates

Australia is in its seventeenth year of uninterrupted economic expansion and enjoys a higher standard of living than any G7 country other than the United States. Since the 1980s, Australia has undertaken significant structural reform of its economy and has transformed itself from an inward-looking, highly protected and regulated marketplace to an open, internationally competitive, export-oriented economy.
Unemployment has been a blight of western economies, including Australia. < (Richardson, S 2004, Unemployment in Australia, viewed 1 May 2008,
http://www.socsci.flinders.edu.au/nils/publications/Unemployment%20in%20Australia%202.pdf) The business cycle of boom and recession in market economies was for decades a cause of high and apparently inflexible unemployment. It takes minimal time for recession to occur and many years to recover from a recession. Over the past decade Australia has fortunately avoided a recession. As a result of this, the rate of unemployment within Australia is steadily falling.

The recent successes on the unemployment front are tainted by some developments that are making it hard for specific groups to obtain adequate hours and continuity of employment. There are two main issues stemming from this; men who have low levels of education, and the substitution of part-time for full-time employment. Men have been withdrawing from the labour force as they are requiring more hours of work and crave the associated higher earning that accompany it. (Richardson, S 2004, Unemployment in Australia, viewed 1 May 2008,
). If it is possible to maintain the economy running at its high level of capacity, without inflation rising, then poorly educated men, youth and part time worker can hold some hope for future employment in Australia.

As the following chart illustrates, the...