2021-12-13 GC Agenda - Item 9 - Attachment 2-Noosa Economic Plan Review Update Report 2021

                                   NOOSA LEP REVIEW - ECONOMIC ANALYSIS REPORT - Draft Report



4.       Employment and Skills
4.1      Labour Force and Unemployment
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Noosa’s unemployment rate rising sharply throughout 2020
(Figure 4.1), even while labour force participation fell 5.6%, or around 1,600 persons over the year to
December 2020. The unemployment rate for South East Queensland and Queensland followed a
similar trajectory.
Given Noosa’s reliance on many tourism-linked industries, these results are not surprising. While not
as reliant on international tourism as some other parts of Queensland, Noosa still had strong
international visitor numbers pre-pandemic. Extended international border closures will continue to
impact the region in the near-term, preventing international visitors from visiting the area and
encouraging Australian visitors to travel domestically. With Victorian visitors a key domestic source
market for Noosa, extended lockdowns in Victoria also hit Noosa hard economically (especially since
these visitors are typically very high yield, i.e. have a much higher expenditure per visitor night
compared to the average).
Labour force data by age and sex are available through the ABS (2021b), however this data is in
original terms and therefore the ABS recommend analysing this data in 12-month rolling average
terms to remove any season factors that may impact the data. A shortcoming of the use of
12-month rolling average terms is that the data will be slow to pick-up the magnitude of any sudden
shocks to the labour market, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. Further, data was only available
at the SA4 level, with the Noosa LGA located within the wider Sunshine Coast SA4 region.
Nevertheless, this data showed the youth unemployment rate in the Sunshine Coast SA4 has risen
substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic, rising from a pre-pandemic level of 13.8% in March 2020
to 16.2% in April 2021. This is a sharper increase than the overall unemployment rate (up from 5.7%
in March 2020 to 7.0% in April 2021), highlighting how youth workers were more significantly
impacted by the pandemic given their stronger likelihood of being employed in industries directly
affected (retail trade, accommodation and food services, etc.).
The participation rate in the Sunshine Coast SA4 also deteriorated due to the pandemic, falling from
63.1% in March 2020 to 59.4% in April 2021. The youth rate participation was even more
significantly affected, falling from 80.3% to 75.7%.

 Labour Force and Unemployment Data
 These data sets are from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) and track
 the number of people in the labour force (total), employed and unemployed. This data is based on
 place of residence, which differs from the analysis above regarding Gross Regional
 Product/Industry Value Add as well as the analysis below regarding employment, which focuses
 on data based on place of work. For the labour force survey, the definition of ‘employed’ includes
 all persons aged 15 years and over who worked for one hour or more during the reference week.




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