The latest official unemployment rate was released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on September 24. It was 4.6% in August, seasonally adjusted, up from 4.2% a year ago. By its calculations, the number of unemployed people had grown by 12.4% in that period to 722,900. Another 6.3% were underemployed.

Two days earlier, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Michele Bullock took part in a “Fireside Chat at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia”, where she revealed that this was on the lower end of the RBA’s unemployment target of between 4.5% and 5%.

Higher unemployment, she said, will take the “heat out of the labor market” and “ease pressure on inflation”.

It’s a familiar tune.

Every RBA governor swears blind that everything the RBA does is to “fight inflation”. If some people get hurt in the process, sorry, that is just a necessary sacrifice because inflation hurts everyone.

However, the RBA governor admitted that inflation “really hits the most vulnerable in the community the hardest”.

“They’re the ones that have the least ability and income to move ... They have less flexibility. They have less discretionary expenditure ... So inflation really, really hits the people on the lowest incomes the hardest.”

So is the RBA........

© Green Left Weekly