The Albanese government blew its shot at setting a historic new unemployment target

• A clearly ambitious statement would have specified a target for unemployment, ideally one that was a bit of a stretch.
• Released at a time when unemployment was almost 10%, it specified a target unemployment rate of 5% – an ambition that served as a beacon for decades.
• Yet the Albanese government has passed up a historic opportunity to say how much less, which it could have done by setting its own target.

Setting our sights below 5%

• That means our unemployment target ought to be somewhere between zero and 5%.
• There will always be people out of work while they are moving between jobs, what the white paper calls “frictional” unemployment.
• I get that we need, in the words of the white paper, “a higher level of ambition than is implied by statistical measures”.

What gets measured gets done

• If a target isn’t specific, it isn’t a target at all (or at best it’s a fuzzy target).
• That means it’s less likely to be aimed at and less likely to be hit.
• But neither could make any boast about hitting the employment target – because there wasn’t one.

How failing to set a target costs jobs

• Read more:
  The RBA's failure to cut rates faster may have cost 270,000 jobs

  Lowe wasn’t held to account for the extra unemployed in the same way as he is being held to account for his performance on inflation.

• Because he was never actually given an unemployment target.
• I am quite prepared to acknowledge that other measures of employment matter, underemployment among them.
• As employers find it hard to hire new workers, they get existing workers to put in more hours.

Our unemployment rate is a proxy for what matters

• This makes the unemployment rate just about the perfect proxy for everything else about the labour market that matters, and just about the perfect number to target.
• Even that would have been less “ambitious” than Keating choosing 5%, when the rate was twice as high.
• Treasurer Chalmers says the government didn’t set a target because apparently the unemployment rate doesn’t capture “the full extent of spare capacity in our economy or the full potential of our workforce”.
• Chalmers is about to update the Reserve Bank’s statement of expectations, the one that until now hasn’t included a target for unemployment.