The labour market is improving, but not for everyone.
The number unemployed fell by 65,000 between the recent peak in July and December's 19-month low.
Despite that turn for the better, there were still over 700,000 counted as unemployed in December.
And 152,000 of them were long-term unemployed - they had been searching for a job without luck for a year or more.
The median duration of job search of the long-term unemployed in December was 105 weeks, according to detailed (and not seasonally adjusted) figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday.
So half of the long-term jobless had been unemployed not just for one year, but for more than two years.
The hapless group that has been unemployed for 105 weeks or more numbered 76,000 in December, a little over one in nine of all unemployed.
At the same time, for the 551,000 who had been unemployed for less than a year the median duration of job-search was was only nine weeks.
So 275,000 unemployed - two in five - had been job-hunting for less than two months or so.
It's a familiar picture.
Most people find a job relatively quickly, but those who don't are typically searching for a long time.
The figures also confirm a long-standing feature of unemployment - the older unemployed take longer to find a job than younger would-be workers.
Inexplicably, the ABS no longer publishes duration of job-search data for the 15-to-19 and 20-to-24 years age groups, now bundling them together.
But the pattern is still clear.
The average duration of unemployment for this younger group in December was 26 weeks, but the median value shows that half of these 233,000 "youth" unemployed had been jobless for less than nine weeks.
At the other end of the scale, while there were only 71,000 unemployed in the 55 to 64 years group, half were still looking after 78 weeks - nearly seven months.
And, while one in seven of 15-to-24 year olds fell into the long-term unemployed category, the proportion rises to more than one in three for the over-55s.
UNEMPLOYMENT - NUMBER AND DURATION* BY AGE GROUP
15-24 years 269,300, average job-search 26 weeks, median 9 weeks
25-34 years 130,100, average job-search 44 weeks, median 14 weeks
35-44 years 122,700, job-search average 47 weeks, median 20 weeks
45-54 years 105,900, job-search average 56 weeks, median 23 weeks
55-64 years 70,900, job-search average 78 weeks, median 29 weeks
65+ years 4,400, job-search average 42 weeks, median 18 weeks
Total: 703,400, job-search average 43 weeks
*The median is the middle-ranked value, dividing the upper and lower halves.
Source: ABS
