Policies risk making job losses worse

First to the winners from the past 12 months: basically the group is dominated by families with two or three children at home, public servants in health and education, older workers with secure jobs and the big kahuna for Australian political profiling, the Australian-born.

We're talking big mainstream middle Australians here, who at the previous election were still voting for Howard but swinging strongly to Labor. They still are, if the opinion polls reflect more than a simple thank you for the $10billion from a grateful four million voters.

The longer-term unemployment losers on the other hand, include one-car homes (usually inner-city), administrative consultants, especially women, people working in finance and real estate, or in hospitality and services and, most worryingly, those suffering mortgage stress, which should ring alarm bells for the Government in Labor's outer-urban marginal seats.

Mortgage stress wasn't a political issue at all in 2007, but it certainly is now. In fact, during the past 12 months we have seen rises in unemployment first from the top quartile of mortgage holders and more recently from the third quartile.

The former trend will feed into home loan stress figures highlighted by recent statistics from the Reserve Bank of Australia, our profile of which showed rising levels of mortgage delinquency among third-quartile mortgages.

Another group bubbling away beneath the surface of statistical significance for short-term unemployment increases is the demographically small but spatially concentrated group of miners.

This group is like Nationals voters - which, come to think of it, they probably are - in that they are small in number but concentrated in politically significant numbers across non-urban seats. They are also very rich and many have been buying investment homes across the country, which are attractive only if the miner is earning enough income to negatively gear their cash flows.

Any significant increase in mining unemployment should have a pretty strong negative impact on the economies of Queensland and Western Australia, the two states that greatly softened the national impact of the last recession.

When they turn south to a significant degree, we're all in real trouble. With recent mining lay-offs, we expect to see that next month.