Australian labour report beats predictions

Australia's run of economic data that turned out not as bad as expected continued with the May labour report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In May the unemployment rate rose to 5.7 per cent, from 5.5 per cent in April. This lifted the number unemployed to a seven-year high of 651,200. The rise was expected, but the number of people with jobs barely moved, falling just 1700 or 0.02 per cent to 10.79 million in May.

This was a markedly better outcome than the 30,000 (0.3 per cent) fall economists had expected.