Today’s release of the – Labour Force data – for December 2014 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that the Australian labour market modestly in the month of December. The good news is that full-time employment growth was positive and the participation rate rose, and unemployment fell. The bad news is that employment remains below the underlying growth in the labour force and the bias is thus towards higher unemployment. Monthly working hours fell this month, which was curious given the predominant full-time employment growth. But monthly data is volatile and the trends are still fairly poor. Remember that last month, the broad ABS labour underutilisation rate – the sum of unemployment and underemployment – was estimated to be at 15 per cent. That is a crisis. So a month’s growth in December is good but needs to be kept in context. The teenage labour market went backwards again this month, which signals an urgent policy problem that the Federal government refuses to recognise or deal with. They are so obsessed with cutting fiscal deficits that they cannot see the future damage they are causing as a result of the appalling state of the youth labour market.