World Crisis Online

By Michael Heath

March 7 (Bloomberg) — Australian job advertisements rose in February for a 10th straight month, as Queensland state cleaned up from flooding in January.

Jobs advertised in newspapers and on the Internet advanced 1.2 percent from January, when they increased a revised 3 percent, according to an Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. report released in Melbourne today. Queensland recorded a 30.5 percent surge in newspaper job advertisements, it said.

“The rise is significant enough to raise the possibility that there has been an increase in labor demand over and above the pre-existing trend due to activities associated with clean up and repairs after the recent floods,” Ivan Colhoun, head of Australian economics and property research at ANZ, said in a statement today.

Torrential rains in Queensland in December and January affected about 30,000 properties, shut coal mines, cut rail lines and damaged crops. Australia’s unemployment rate probably held at 5 percent in February, a report will show on March 10, according to a Bloomberg survey of 19 economists.

The Reserve Bank of Australia “will interpret an unchanged unemployment rate as reflecting an economy growing at around a trend rate of growth,” Colhoun said. “This will leave the bank comfortably on hold in the near term.”

Surging shipments of iron ore and coal to China are fueling a jobs boom, prompting the RBA to raise borrowing costs seven times from October 2009 to November last year. It left rates unchanged last week at 4.75 percent for a third straight meeting.

National vacancies advertised in newspapers rose 4.4 percent in February, and Internet notices advanced 1 percent, today’s report showed.

–Editors: Brendan Murray, Edward Johnson