All of a sudden, unemployment is back up to 6.0 per cent.
And the return to the 10-year high reached in January and February is a reminder that the economy just isn't generating enough growth.
The monthly ups and downs in employment - like the fall of 5,100 in May and the 15,900 rise in June reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday - would best be ignored.
No one can be sure that these changes actually happened, because the sample of households surveyed by the ABS changes from month to month and never exactly matches the characteristics of the entire population.
Allowing for that, the bureau estimates there's only a two in three chance that the actual change in employment in June was somewhere between a fall of 12,800 and a rise of 44,600.
So much for a rise of 15,900 confirming economists' forecasts centred on a 15,000 rise.
It just turned out that the educated guesswork of economists and the ABS happened to line up this month.
So let's not get too carried away with the size of this month's rise or last month's supposed fall.
What we do know is that the trend, a smoothed version of the volatile seasonally-adjusted figures, has very probably slowed.
The monthly growth rate peaked at about 19,000 in March but, according to the bureau's calculations, is now only about 11,000 a month, barely a third of the growth rate of the working-age population.
With such a weak trend, the only way a higher unemployment rate will be avoided is if a greater proportion of the population retreats to the sidelines, retiring or dropping out of the labour market for some other reason.
A rule of thumb is that the current trend in jobs growth will result in a higher unemployment rate unless that proportion - the participation rate, currently 64.6 per cent of the working age population - falls by 0.5 per year.
There's a good chance that might happen.
But that wouldn't be much to cheer about, because falling participation is a symptom of a weak labour market, and the labour market is indeed weak right now.
Not catastrophically, disastrously weak.
Just too weak to give much hope that unemployment will soon come down, or even to offer any certainty that it won't head higher from here.
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