Australian job advertisements continue to fall in July

Australian newspaper and internet job advertisements have declined for five months since February, the latest ANZ Job Advertisement survey showed on Tuesday. The survey by ANZ Bank found the number of jobs advertised in newspapers and on the internet fell 1.1 percent in July after falling 1.6 percent in June. ANZ chief economist Ivan Colhoun said it was the fifth consecutive monthly decline and left the July result around 19 percent below yearago levels. Internet job advertisements fell 0.9 percent in July, while newspaper ads dropped 6.8 percent, the survey found. Internet job advertising has become the predominant form of advertising for jobs in Australia and accounts for around 95 percent of all job advertisements in the survey, according to Colhoun. "The continuing trend decline in advertising is consistent, unfortunately, with a further modest rise in the unemployment rate over coming months," he said in a statement. Senior economist at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Su-Lin Ong said the ANZ jobs data showed the unemployment rate would continue to rise for the rest of the year. "We actually think the most important data was the ANZ job vacancies data, the trend is very much all in one direction," she said.