Australia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 5.5% in April 2021, down from 6.4% in April 2020 when the pandemic first hit, according to data from the Australia Bureau of Statistics.

The unemployment rate stood at 5.7% in March 2021.

Australia’s JobKeeper Payment programme, its Covid-19 stimulus jobs package, ended on 28 March 2021.

The Bureau said the end of the JobKeeper wage subsidy did not have a discernible impact on employment between March and April.

“We have not seen large changes in the indicators that would suggest a clear JobKeeper impact, such as an increase in people working reduced or zero hours for economic reasons or because they were leaving their job. We also haven’t seen large net flows out of employment across many population groups,” Bjorn Jarvis, head of labour statistics at the ABS, said.

The number of unemployed people stood at 756,200 in April 2021, a decrease of 89,100 when compared to April 2020 and down from 789,900 in March 2021.

The youth unemployment rate decreased 1.1% over the month to 10.6% and was 3.4% lower than April 2020.

Meanwhile, over the year to April 2021, employment increased by 637,900 people (5.1%). When compared to the previous month, employment decreased by 30,600 people (0.2%) to 13.04 million people.

In seasonally adjusted terms, in April 2021, the labour force participation rate increased 2.4% since April 2020, but fell 0.3% when compared to March 2021.

In seasonally adjusted terms, in April 2021, monthly hours worked in all jobs increased by 12.5% over the year. It decreased by 13 million hours (0.7%) to 1.79 billion hours when compared to March 2021.

Rod Hore, Director at HHMC Global, an M&A advisory firm for the recruitment industry, said, “The first full month after turning off the Covid employee funding tap and unemployment continued to go down. It is not as simple as that, but better than everyone was expecting.”