Our resident Stats Guy takes a look at the national unemployment rate from the 1960s to now to see what the future holds.

The squiggly line below displays our national unemployment rate and tells the story of the Australian economy over the last six decades.

We went from super-low figures in the 1960s to volatile swings in the 1980s and 1990s, to stable 2010s – and might go back to 1960s figures again in a decade.

Each major shift has been driven by demographics, macroeconomic jolts, technology and even political decisions. Let’s take a closer look at Australia’s economic history throughout the decades together.

In the 1960s, Australia enjoyed remarkably low unemployment rates of around 2 per cent.

World War II had just ended, the Great Depression was in the rearview mirror, and the nation took a sigh of relief.

A strong sense of optimism leads to a postwar baby boom. Manufacturing is robust, Holdens are being mass produced, roads are getting built, and the economy expands at pace and absorbs almost all available labour.

We saw relatively few young men entering the workforce as their birth cohort wasn’t huge.

The almost 40,000 Australian men who lost their lives in WWII left a hole in the workforce. Only around a third of all women participated in the workforce when the war had ended (today around two-thirds of women are in the workforce).

Industrial policy prioritised full capacity and immigration programs were relatively suppressed.

In short, Australia was running on a strong growth engine with sufficient job creation to match the slowly evolving workforce – economic equilibrium in a rapidly developing nation.

In the 1970s the unemployment rate quickly doubled as the huge Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-63) entered the workforce.

This surge in labour supply increased competition for jobs, drove down wages, and the unemployment rate saw post war highs.

The macroeconomic environment was tough too. Global oil shocks and ensuing stagflation meant that economies around the world were hit by rising costs and slower growth.

Geopolitical uncertainty and........

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