It is always time to celebrate when unemployment falls and participation rises it. But when unemployment is 591,000 and it only falls by 2,600 which means at the one decimal point level the unemployment rate remains constant you realise that employment growth is barely keeping pace with population growth and the labour market, still damaged by the crisis, is not nothing much is happening at all in the labour market. This is the conclusion I draw after today’s release by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) of the Labour Force data for June 2011. It was good to see full-time employment growing again after two months going the other direction but the overall scene is very subdued and far from the “bursting at the seams” rhetoric that we hear in the daily media. The headline discussion, however, should be the appalling state of the teenage labour market who continue to lose jobs. The Australian economy is nowhere near full employment and the slack remained about constant in June 2011.