The Latest Breaking News from Bureau of Statistics

Rising unemployment and falling job vacancies may be signalling a turning point in Australia's labour market, economists say.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its first time-use survey in 15 years. The last time it collected such data, in 2006, Apple was yet to release the iPhone and Facebook was a start-up.

Australia’s consumer price index is about to go monthly, meaning Australia will join most of the developed world in getting an update on inflation at the end of every month, instead of once every three months as at present.

When Labor leader Anthony Albanese couldn’t quote Australia’s unemployment rate in the first week of the election campaign, many said it didn’t matter: the Australian Bureau of Statistics figure was “meaningless”; “fudged”; “manipulated”; and didn’t count all those who had registered for JobSeeker.

By lifting its cash rate by 0.5 points, from 0.35% to 0.85%, the Reserve Bank has added about another $120 per month in payments for a A$500,000 mortgage.

Every three months the Bureau of Statistics releases the lesser-known cousin of the consumer price index. It’s called the Wage Price Index (WPI) and it records changes in the overall level of wages, in the same way the price index records changes in the overall level of consumer prices.

You would be forgiven for being unsure about whether the buying power of wages was rising or falling. On one hand, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese says wages are going backwards.

One of the stranger things about the Reserve Bank’s announcement of why it’s lifting interest rates by 0.25 percentage points is that it suggests inflation will come down by itself.

Australian consumer prices jumped an extraordinary 2.1% in the first three months of the year, the biggest quarterly jump since the introduction of the 10% goods and services tax at the start of the century.