In the last few weeks I have done several radio interviews about the veracity of the labour force data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The pretext has been an increasing awareness among commentators and journalists of an alternative series published by pollster – Roy Morgan. The juxtaposition of an ABS unemployment rate estimate for December 2011 of 5.2 per cent against Roy Morgan’s estimate of 8.6 per cent worries people and curious minds have been seeking to find out what is going on. The curiosity also extends to matters like seasonal adjustment. Last week, I consistently said that in seasonally adjusted terms people were dropping out of the labour force (as evidenced by the falling participation rate), which had lessened the impact of the negative employment growth on the unemployment. But in one interview I complicated matters by saying that in fact more people were in the labour force in December and employment rose. The two statements were not inconsistent. The former was about the seasonally-adjusted data and the latter was about the original time series produced by the ABS. I often get E-mails about this question. Which estimates should we use to tell us what is going on? So I thought I should write a blog about that – to catalogue these issues.