Kelvin Davidson

So, you know, I think in the end, any rise in the unemployment rate is not ideal.

You know, we'd want to see it be going down.

So that's kind of, I think, the overall message here.

It's not great, but...

Yeah, when you split it down a little bit more, it was sort of a so-called good increase in the unemployment rate, if you can have that.

And it comes down to a supply and demand argument, really.

So what we saw was that actually employment went up.

So there was job creation.

So there were more people going into work in the fourth quarter.

So that's good.

It's just that on the other side of the equation, so there was more demand for workers.

But on the other side of the equation, we've always got a growing working age population.

There's still a bit of migration coming in.

Generally, as people move into, they get a year older, you stock up the working age population a bit more.

So that's always going on.

But not only that, the proportion of those people in the working age population increased a little bit.

So the participation rate went up.

And, you know, that could happen for any number of reasons.

It's not as if it's a massive shift.

But one interpretation is that people who otherwise might have been feeling a bit discouraged from the labour force, you know, feeling a little bit downbeat about the whole thing.