One in nine jobless Australians over two years without work

Older unemployed people found it harder to find work than their younger counterparts as the overall number of jobless Australians fell in the second half of 2015

The number of jobless Australians fell by 65,000 between the recent peak in July and December’s 19-month low. Despite that turn for the better, there were still over 700,000 Australians counted as unemployed in December. And 152,000 of them were long-term unemployed – they had been searching for a job without luck for a year or more.

The median duration of job searches of the long-term unemployed in December was 105 weeks, according to detailed, not seasonally adjusted, figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday. So half of the long-term jobless had been unemployed not just for one year, but for more than two.

The hapless group that has been unemployed for 105 weeks or more numbered 76,000 in December, a little over one in nine of all those without a job.

At the same time, for the 551,000 who had been jobless for less than a year, the median duration of job-search was only nine weeks. So 275,000 unemployed people – two in five – had been job-hunting for less than two months or so.

It’s a familiar picture. Most people find a job relatively quickly, but those who don’t are typically searching for a long time.

The figures also confirm a long-standing feature of unemployment – the older unemployed take longer to find a job than younger would-be workers.

The average duration of unemployment for this younger group in December was 26 weeks, but the median value shows that half of these 233,000 ‘youth’ unemployed had been jobless for less than nine weeks.

At the other end of the scale, while there were only 71,000 unemployed in the 55 to 64 years-old age group, half were still looking after 78 weeks – nearly seven months.

And, while one in seven of 15-to-24 year olds fell into the long-term unemployed category, the proportion rises to more than one in three for the over-55s.

AAP