The Australian Bureau of Statistics released of its latest data today (January 23, 2020) – Labour Force, Australia, December 2019 – which continues to show that the Australian economy is in a weak state with a fairly moderate labour market performance being recorded for December 2020. The culprit – the Australian government – which is starving spending by its obsessive pursuit of a fiscal surplus. While unemployment fell by 0.1 points as a result of the employment growth, full-time employment also fell. So all the net job opportunities created were part-time which suggests that the quality of the overall employment mix has deteriorated. In the last six months, 74 per cent of net employment change has been in the part-time labour market. The broad labour underutilisation (unemployment plus underemployment) is at 13.4 per cent and has been stuck around that level for months. There is no dynamic – policy or otherwise – present, which will see this massive pool of available labour brought back into productive use anytime soon. That alone, is a indictment of failed policy. The unemployment rate is 0.6 percentage points above what even the central bank considers to the level where inflationary pressures might be sourced from the labour market. The Government is thus deliberately inducing deflationary tendencies into the economy and it is the workers that are bearing the brunt. My overall assessment is that the Australian labour market remains a considerable distance from full employment. This persistence in labour wastage indicates that the policy settings are too tight (biased to austerity) and deliberately reducing growth and income generation. There is clear room for some serious fiscal policy expansion at present. The Federal government is willfully undermining our economy with its irresponsible policy position. The impact of the bushfire crisis is likely to start being felt in next month’s figures.