CANBERRA (CU)_Australia is less than six weeks away from the 2022 federal election and the candidates have kicked off their election campaigns, with plans to spend the weeks ahead on the road before the vote. On Tuesday (12 April), Opposition leader Anthony Albanese had just concluded his first full day of campaigning when he made another major economic blunder during his address in the Labor-held eastern Tasmanian seat of Lyons, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not fail to seize the opportunity to say the Labour leader didn’t get the economy.
Voters in Australia were forced to wonder if Albanese fully understood the labour market after he failed to recall the country’s unemployment rate on Monday, as he campaigned in Launceston in the marginal Liberal-held seat of Bass. “The national unemployment rate at the moment is… I think it’s 5.4… sorry. I’m not sure what it is,” he told reporters. Nothing could be farther from the truth, since the jobless of Australia fell to four per cent in February, the lowest since August 2008.
Accordingly, the opposition leader went into damage control the following day, only to make another big blunder with his claims about casual work in the Pacific nation. Having repeatedly stated that Australia’s rate of casual work has been increasing, Albanese stood by these claims saying “We’re not exaggerating the level of insecure work”.
Speaking to reporters on 29 March, the Labour leader said the rate of casualisation was growing, despite the fact that data issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) prove otherwise. “What we see is growth in the gig economy, a growth of casualisation, the growth of contracting out and labour hire companies,” he said at the time. Meanwhile, figures published by ABS show that the level of casualisation in Australia peaked at 27.6 per cent in August 2003, before dropping to 24.1 per cent in February 2020, ahead of the first COVID lockdowns. Subsequently, this figure declined further to 22.5 per cent in August 2021 and20.8 per cent in February this year.
However, it must be noted that the national statistical office casual workers as a share of employees on the payroll while the Labour leader is concerned over the rise in contractor labour, which is often relied on by firms like Uber and Deliveroo. Nevertheless, PM Morrison did not fail to seize on Albanese’s blunder, saying his “fundamental understanding of the economy is wrong”.
