The best place in Australia for employment prospects is Sydney, with new data showing the eastern suburbs and northern beaches have the lowest jobless levels in the country.
New data from CommSec for the year to October 2016 revealed that five of Australia's ten lowest areas for unemployment are in Sydney, with the the eastern suburbs having the best record of all, with just 2.9 per cent out of work and the northern beaches just behind with three per cent.
In addition, the unemployment rate was below four per cent in Sutherland, North Sydney and Hornsby. It was also this low in two other New South Wales districts; the outer-west and Blue Mountains.
Overall, unemployment in the state was 4.9 per cent, compared with a national figure of 5.6 per cent. Not everywhere in the state has done well, however: New England and north-west region saw eight per cent unemployment and south-west Sydney had unemployment rates above the national average. Even so, the simple fact is that New South Wales has had the lowest unemployment rate of any Australian state for 17 successive months.
Commsec's chief economist Craig James said: "NSW leads the nation's economies at present, so it makes sense that it dominates the list of regions with the lowest unemployment rates in the nation."
Sydney itself has certainly enjoyed solid growth. Growth in 2014-15 was 3.5 per cent, the strongest since the Olympics year of 2000.
Indeed, the data may suggest parts of big cities are doing better than the wider states. Queensland, for example, has five of the ten biggest unemployment blackspots - mainly in areas hit by the mining downturn - but the jobless rate is just 3.4 per cent in the inner-city of Brisbane.
According to the Australian Bureau of statistics, the national jobless total was virtually unchanged between September and October, while the proportion of the working age population in employment was fractionally down from 64.6 per cent to 64.5 per cent.
