politicalowl

The OECD area employment rate – defined as the proportion of people of working-age who are employed – was 65.0% in the second quarter of 2012. This figure is 0.1 percentage point higher than in the previous quarter and 0.2 percentage point higher than one year ago but still 1.5 percentage points below the pre-financial-crisis level. Australia has fared a little better than the OECD as a whole. Its second quarter employment rate of 72.5 per cent was well above the average and only 0.7 points less than it was back in 2008. The OECD figures show that the biggest decline in the Australian employment rate has occurred among youth aged 15 to 24. There the 2008 rate of 65% has fallen to 60.1%. For those defined as being of prime working age - aged 25 to 54 - the decline has been from 80.3% in 2008 to 79.5% in the second quarter. For older Australian workers the employment rate has actually risen - from 57.3% in 2008 to a current rate of 61.4% EMPLOYMENT RATE IN OECD COUNTRIES ...

Quite a difference of opinion among the pundits about what impact the last week of parliamentary proceedings will have made on the general voting public. At Crikey we are running a little survey to see what the wisdom of our readers think will happen. I'd be happy to have your input as well. Just fill in the form below where we are trying to determine what result the next Newspoll will show but remember we are trying to estimate what will happen to public opinion not what people think should happen to public opinion.

In the Sydney Morning Herald  it only made it to page 10 while The Age had it on page three but this story will still prove damaging enough: It marks yet another step in moving out from the relative obscurity of the internet into the mainstream the pursuit of details about Julia Gillard's past life as a lawyer and her relations with the Australian Workers Union. With the two Fairfax papers now joining, in a strangely understated way, The Australian in indicating this is a story that needs to be reported, the Prime Minister will find it increasingly difficult to dismiss it as the misogynist rantings of disreputable bloggers. You will find the full fascinating account HERE but this extract gives the flavour: A TRADE union association from which hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen by a former boyfriend of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was only registered after Ms Gillard vouched for its legitimacy to authorities in Western Australia. Ms Gillard - then a salarie...

Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels Not so super when someone drives offshore with your cash Smuggish Thoughts (Self-indulgent)  from Paul Krugman The harmful myth of the balanced budget Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind - new poll from George Mason University and Yale’s  Project on Climate Change Communication (click to enlarge)

Attack is the best form of defence was the Prime Ministerial motto today when confronted with the nauseating revelations about the man she made Speaker of the House of Representatives. And it was quite a stirring speech if the subject had been the views of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. But the irrelevance of Julia Gillard's attempt to avoid the embarrassment of supporting a sleaze bag became clear when Peter Slipper resigned from the job. Yet another example of this Labor Government's ability to manufacture unnecessary humiliations.

The signs are emerging that Australia might escape the impact of an  El Niño this year. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that m ost dynamical models it surveys suggest that sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific will maintain values around El Niño thresholds before returning to clearly neutral values towards the end of 2012 or early 2013. Hence there is an increased likelihood of avoiding the dry conditions  El Niño's produce.

As someone who no longer buys a printed version of a newspaper I was not at all surprised to find in the latest survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that in the US the  transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. What did surprise me was the finding that    there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers. Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – ...