As unemployment rises, the slowdown in China hits home and demand for iron ore and coal plummets, Australia’s buoyant economy is crashing back to earth

After 24 years of uninterrupted economic growth, Australia is entering the kind of difficult waters experienced by every other major developed country in the past decade.

Even if Thursday’s unemployment figures show more jobs were added last month, the Coalition is set to go into the next election with an unusually gloomy outlook.

Australians are finding it harder to get a job than at any time in more than decade and those who are in work are seeing the weakest wage growth for two decades. There are even fears that taxes might have to go up to cover a $25bn budget black hole caused by falling commodity prices.

As one leading economist put it, the lucky country is running out of luck.

Growth is still on target for a healthy at 2.8% for this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the kind of number that would send European leaders scrambling for the tweet button. But the question of whether Australia loses its remarkable record of continuous growth depends, as with almost everything else in the economy, on what happens in China.

“Australia has gone 24 years without a recession thanks to good management and good luck,” said Saul Eslake, the chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Sydney. “Up to the early 2000s it was managed well and then it wasn’t. But then the luck improved because of China’s huge stimulus after the global financial crisis. Now the luck is running out.”

The slowdown in the world’s second biggest economy is now well and truly underway. Demand for Australia’s iron ore and coal has plummeted from a decade ago as Beijing seeks to scale back its huge building schemes and create a more consumer-led economy. The price of the steel-making commodity, Australia’s biggest export, has fallen from $130 at the start of 2014 to around $50. Coal has halved in price in the past four years.

Buoyed by the good times, resource companies led by BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto launched a huge expansion which saw mining investment as a percentage of the Australian economy peak at a whopping 7% in 2012. The new output from their giant mines in Western Australia is now hitting the market, making export figures look healthy but adding to the pressure on prices and leaving Australia with a potentially wretched hangover.

Unemployment is now at 6.3% – the highest rate for 13 years – and wages are lagging inflation.

“Australia is the only major developing country where unemployment is rising,” says Eslake. “It’s falling in the UK, the US and even in Europe, where it is high, it is starting to come down. That is nearly all due to the fact that the income-generating machine in China has been switched off. Australia is coming back to the rest of the world.”

As a result, there’s another headwind on the demand side. “Real wage growth is doing nothing,” says James Glenn, senior economist at National Australia Bank. “Our surveys show people are nervous. They don’t want to spend so instead they’re paying down debts and reining in discretionary spending.”



The way forward for Australia is not entirely clear but it will have to involve new markets and job growth in different sectors. A weaker dollar will help. At parity with the greenback two years ago, the Australian currency now buys US76c, which should help exporters.

Manufacturing would once have stepped up to the plate. But Australia’s factories are struggling to compete in the global marketplace, as evidenced by the planned shutdown of carmakers Ford, Holden (part of General Motors) and Toyota in quick succession with the loss of thousands of well-paid jobs.

In Geelong, an industrial city west of Melbourne, Ford has just about packed everything into the boot and is ready to drive off, leaving a skeleton testing and design staff.

Rob Hamilton, owner of Rob Hamilton Bearings, says the city has been hit hard by the shrinking of the auto industry but also by the closure of the Alcoa aluminium smelter last year.

“There’s high youth unemployment because people aren’t qualified. The old manual, non-skilled jobs are not being replaced,” he said, reflecting fears that the manufacturing sector will not easily respond to the challenge.

But despite a noticeable downturn when Alcoa closed with the loss of 1,000 jobs and lots of service contracts for outside businesses, Hamilton senses that belief is coming back, a feeling borne out by an upturn in confidence in March.

“It certainly has had an effect on the town. But it’s been reasonably good this year, up on the same time last year. I think people thought it was doomsday and they put away the order books. But now they can see that life’s going on and things are going along better.”

Some believe the country’s soaring housing market – prices are up nearly 15% in Sydney in the past 12 months – is a sign that the luck hasn’t run out just yet. Chinese investors are credited with boosting the sector and construction is set to rise sharply in the next few years, helped by record low interest rates of 2.25%. Another cut is likely before treasurer Joe Hockey delivers his budget on 12 May.

Optimists also point to a local share market, which has benefited from the strong dollar as investors pumped cash into Australia’s large and profitable banks.

But with house prices beyond the reach of young professionals and the financial sector making up almost half of the valuation of the stock market at a time when many other businesses are on their knees, it could be time to look for another way forward.

Agriculture might be one. Australia has the second most efficient farmers in the world – after dairy world champions New Zealand – and the government is pushing hard for the sector to be both the granary and the larder to cater for the changing tastes of Asia’s growing middle classes.

Services such as tourism, banking and wealth management and also education, which attracts large numbers of Asian students, are also possible growth areas for the future.

Glenn identifies tourism as a clear winner from a lower dollar as visitors get more for their cash and Australians holiday at home, and also nominates the political push for new frontiers. “Free trade agreements will definitely help to open up new markets in China, but it won’t happen overnight,” he says.

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The other problem is that everybody else has got the same idea. Building markets in food and services is, as Eslake points out, a far more competitive field than mining in which Australia had a huge natural advantage.

“New Zealand, the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe and even Ukraine can all supply food to China so we have to manage it better ... and we need more capital and that means more foreign investment,” he says.

“Australia has had 20 years the like of which we’ll never see again. But it’s going to get harder now.”