The Bureau of Statistics has the jobs numbers back on track. It has reworked its seasonal adjustment process to remove the wild gyrations of recent months that had called into question the entire survey and produced a new set of numbers for October that it believes represents the truth - and they are awful.

The best guide to the state of employment is the Employment to Population Ratio. It measures the proportion of the adult population in work, unaffected by the proportion of those not working who choose to define themselves as unemployed.It has sunk to a ten-year low.

In October and also in September only 60.5 per cent of the working age population was in a job. (Unrounded the proportion was 60.53 in October up from 60.50 in September, so if the government really wants to it can argue there has been an improvement .)