The Bureau of Statistics released a bit of data this morning which provides more detail for last week's unemployment numbers.

It helps us to update pictures like this one, which shows the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies.

(I used the "original" numbers to make this graph, rather than "seasonally adjusted" numbers).

If you recall, last week's numbers from the ABS showed that the unemployment rate had surprisingly dropped between January and February from 4.1% to 3.7%.

It raised some eyebrows among economists, because GDP data show that economic activity has well-and-truly slowed down over the last year, so why would the unemployment rate drop so much when economic activity has obviously been weakening?

The consensus seemed to be that we should wait a few months to see what happens to the data, in case there's something strange going on.

But in the meantime, economists said we should be prepared to see the sharp drop in the unemployment rate reverse quite quickly in coming months, since the number of job vacancies is continuing to decline.

And today's data provide evidence for that argument.

Between November and February, the number of job vacancies shrank by 23,800 (in original terms) while the number of officially unemployed people increased by 66,900.

Job vacancies are still much higher than they were pre-COVID, but they're now 23.5 per cent lower than they were at their peak in mid-2022 and they're heading lower - and we can expect to see unemployment heading in the opposite direction.