Australia unemployment to soar to 11.1% by June | Hacker News Reader

Australia unemployment to soar to 11.1% by June

bloomberg.com

38 pointshhs31 comments

First day after mandatory shutdown of various businesses where people congregate in a "disorganized" manner, and Centrelink (Government service for the unemployed - to put it very crudely) has massive queues and the website crashes due to overload[0]

Article linked to specifically says:

"The Government is estimating at least 1 million people could be made unemployed, joining the 700,000 people already receiving unemployment benefits.

That could take Australia's unemployment rate from 5.1 per cent to closer to 15 per cent."

  700k unemployed =  5.1%
  1.7m unemployed = 15.0%

Therefore employable population is between 11.3m and 13.7m

[0]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/centrelink-minister-s...

Tired of all these headlines with the use of emotionally laden words like "soar", "crash", "plummet", "skyrocket", "plunge", "collapse", etc. Especially the last few weeks journalists are in overdrive with their thesaurus usage.

Why don't you just present the facts and let the reader decide what literary narrative to assign to the story?

What adjective would you use to describe a rise in the unemployment rate from around 5% to above 11% in three months?

I understand and agree with the idea that emotionally laden words don’t always add much to the story, but in this case I think ‘soar’ is probably close to the mark. Australia’s unemployment rate peaked at 11.2% in 1992, and has only gone above 7% for a couple of months in the last 20 years.

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/australia/unemployment...

"Australia unemployment may rise to 11.1% by June" would be a reasonable headline for this specific article.

CNN engagement will plunge with these kind of neutral titles

Australian unemployment may double by June ?

“Australia may see a rise in the unemployment rate from around 5% to above 11% in three months“

"Doubles".

I always had a similar distaste for headlines with words like "blast" and "slam", but learned recently[0] that these are standard abbreviations for headline writers to save space. Your words are not on that list from Wikipedia, but "soar" & "crash" might be used in such a way to shorten "{in,de}crease". (But certainly not "skyrocket"!)

Of course, isn't that convenient that they carry greater emotional weight...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290486

Are "rise" and "fall" not perfectly acceptable neutral alternatives?

I think most readers wouldn't know how to interpret 11.1% unemployment. Is that good or bad? How good or bad?

It's like telling the average person that your geiger counter reads 3.6 roentgens. That doesn't mean anything to them.

Also state if that’s above/below target/limit/guideline/"we have no idea but it sounds nice"?

if you present the current unemployment rate in the article to give the reader some context, they will be able to conclude whether it's good or bad themselves.

Better yet, compare it to olden times like the great depression, and give the reader more context.

For a country that hasn't had a recession in 25 years, it's really bad.

I believe that the growing political polarization and anger we are seeing is in no small part due to the government and media "implanting" invalid perceptions of reality into people's minds (skillful use of language being only one of the many techniques used), and different groups each receive a different projection.

Scott Adams uses the analogy of different groups seeing a completely different movie on the screen.

Considering the graphs, "skyrocket" doesn't seem inappropriate...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2020/mar/24...

German news are mostly in comparison much more factual and neutral compared to this. I prefer the German news because of this.

Highly charged headlines drive clicks, thereby increasing ad revenue.

Don't forget "whopping."

I wonder how it's neighbour New Zealand would fair given that they are on a full lockdown with compulsary self-isolation for all citizens?[0]

The article mentions that a "turnaround will come in the final three months of 2020", but surely Australia is going to be impacted just has badly as other states and this isn't even the beginning?

[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12046807...

Current modeling indicates that the number of COVID-19 infections will peak in Australia in August[0].

If the modeling is correct, December will have a similar number of active infections as April, but the number will be declining.

I imagine Australian governments will be keen to restart the economy as soon as it's safe to do so.

[0] https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/dreaded-duo-austral...

I'm in NZ.... hard to tell, we have some significant financial aid for businesses to finance and pay wages during the lockdown. Not sure how that's going to work out. It feels like we are possibly in a bit of a sweet spot where we are small enough but big enough to weather our way through this, but hard to know anything for sure. I think we will see the tourism industry savaged a fair bit.

also...In many ways I'm way more worried about the fallout from the US economy, their whole leadership seems a mess with great political divides, lots of mixed messages, and a large growth in cases.

similarly in NZ.

The health care system is pretty abysmal here which I think is why the government is acting so strongly now; The city I'm in has just 18 ICU beds for a population of around 500,000. We're heading into winter as well and from what I've heard the government is expecting to hit peek case-rates in August.

If that is the case, I expect the full lockdowns will be a periodic thing over the coming months in order to keep cases manageable.

Too early to really tell how this is going to play out, but I don't think the current financial measures are enough; I expect we'll continue to see them expand in the coming weeks in an attempt to keep businesses a float.

I read that in Australia there are a total of 2,200 ICU beds for the ~25 million population. As a result of COVID-19 they're increasing this number as much as possible, but if the infection rates continue the current trend, then there are going to be large numbers of people dying due to the lack of resources.

  18 in 500,000 is 0.00366%
  2,200 in 25,000,000 is 0.0088%

More than double, but still likely to be woefully inadequate.

NZ is going into lockdown earlier (but not as early as I would have liked), so that may help. We have ~150 known cases right now, with all but a handful having a clear link to international travel. If people follow the lockdown rules, it seems like it could work, but just like everywhere else, there are idiots here too, so I hope it's enforced pretty hard.

Given the lockdown...isnt that sort of expected? If most people are at home, then what work is being done? And even before this, when they were progressively limiting the number of people who could travel to australia, you would expect employment in tourism related industries to go down a lot.

I’m in Tasmania.

As of ~11hrs ago we appear to have no community transmitted cases.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/has-tasmania-been-spa...

Seems like an underestimate.

And so? US will be at 20% of the population not working soon. Why single out Australia.

This is one article among literally thousands of articles reporting the economic impact of covid-19 around the world. I wouldn't call that singling out Australia.

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