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The unemployment rate fell to 3.7 per cent in February, from 4.1 per cent in January.
It was a surprisingly large decline, but does it mean we're moving closer to full employment?
When Treasurer Jim Chalmers released his Employment White Paper last year, he unveiled a new definition of "full employment."
He said we had to think about more than the headline unemployment rate.
He said when an economy's operating at full employment, workers should be getting the hours they want, with fair pay.
It shouldn't take long for people to find a job, or to switch jobs.
Long-term unemployment should be minimal, and barriers to youth employment should be few.
In short, he said we had to look at a broader suite of measures to gauge the true extent of labour's under-utilisation in the economy.
So, let's see what that looks like.
Here are some interactive templates of key labour market data that we'll be including in our stories on the unemployment rate every month.
They'll help us to track the Albanese government's full employment ambitions, and to make better sense of any surprise movements in single numbers each month.
The treasurer's definition of full employment is different from the Reserve Bank's.
The RBA uses a technical and more narrow definition: it says full employment is the level of unemployment that's consistent with stable wage or price inflation.
From the RBA's perspective, we have over-full employment at the moment, which means it thinks the level of unemployment is so low it's contributing to wage and price inflation.
Currently, the headline unemployment rate is 3.7 per cent.
The RBA thinks we'll probably enjoy a sustainable level of "full employment" when the unemployment rate increases to be sitting somewhere around 4.25 to 4.5 per cent.
The template below shows us what other employment indicators look like when the unemployment rate moves around.
Scroll your cursor over one of the lines, and you'll notice how the numbers in all four boxes move in sync with each other.
The unemployment rate refers to the number of people who are actively looking for work but haven't found a job yet, expressed as a percentage of the labour force.
The underemployment rate refers to the number of underemployed workers (workers who aren't getting the hours they want), expressed as a percentage of the labour force.
When you add those two rates together — the unemployment rate plus the underemployment rate — you get the underutilisation rate, which reflects the large proportion of people in the labour force who aren't working as much as they would like, either because they don't have enough hours or don't have a job at all.
In the template above, notice how long-term unemployment (unemployed for 52 weeks or more) fell to a multi-decade low in April last year, but it's been increasing as those broader measures of underutilisation have been increasing.
Next, we'll track some other indicators.
The participation rate and employment-to-population ratio both picked up in February, and they're sitting very close to record highs.
We'll also monitor the time it's taking people to find a job.
The median duration of job search, which we've smoothed out using a 12-month average, is sitting around 11 weeks nationally. In the years before the pandemic, it was averaging between 15 and 16 weeks.
And finally, another important indicator of labour market "tightness" is the relationship between job vacancies and unemployment.
Employers like it when lots of people are applying for each job. Workers prefer the opposite.
When we experienced the peak of labour market tightness in September 2022, there was practically one unemployed person for every job vacancy.
As a worker, that was a great time to be choosy about where you wanted to work, and to haggle for a pay increase.
But after the RBA rapidly hiked rates, and borders were reopened and population growth picked up again, the number of unemployed people began increasing as job vacancies fell.
We're still a long way away from our pre-pandemic scenario, when there were 700,000 unemployed people and only 220,000 job vacancies, but we may be heading there again.
On Thursday, Abhijit Surya from Capital Economics said the sharp fall in the unemployment rate in February was probably a "blip" rather than a trend, and pointed to job vacancies as evidence.
"With job vacancies continuing to fall, we suspect the unemployment rate will rise anew in the months ahead," he said.
"That said, the labour market is still tighter than most had thought [... ] although the RBA dialled back its hawkish bias at its meeting yesterday, it will probably wait for further data to confirm that there are no risks to the inflation outlook from a stronger-than-expected labour market.
"The upshot is that we still expect the Bank to hand down its first rate cut only in August, with risks tilted towards policy being loosened later," he said.
So, the RBA will keep relying on its more narrow definition of full employment to guide its decisions on interest rates, while the Albanese government says it will focus on removing structural barriers to employment so the "sustainable" level of unemployment can be lower than it has been in recent decades.
The templates above will track how that effort goes in coming years.