Australia's unemployment rate supposedly hit an 11-year high in September - problem is, nobody trusts the numbers.
Official labour market figures have been all over the place in the past few months, showing surprising, if not downright unbelievable, results.
The figures showed unemployment at a 12-year high of 6.4 per cent in July, before suggesting a record 121,000 jobs were added to the economy in August.
Both results blindsided economists and even left the Australian Bureau of Statistics sceptical, although an initial investigation found no deficiencies in its methodologies.
But on Wednesday, the ABS admitted there were problems with the way it adjusted the data to remove the effect of regular seasonal influences.
It's seeking independent advice to develop an appropriate method for adjusting the data in future.
In the meantime, it replaced seasonally adjusted labour force estimates already published for July and August with unadjusted figures, and said the unadjusted and seasonally adjusted figures for September were the same.
The September figures, released on Thursday, show the unemployment rate rose to an 11-year high of 6.1 per cent, from 6.0 per cent in August.
The total number of people with jobs fell 29,700 to 11.593 million.
The fiasco has left economists in the dark as to the state of the labour market, TD Securities head of Asia-Pacific research Annette Beacher said.
"Confidence in these figures is wafer thin at present," she said.
National Australia Bank senior economist David de Garis said economists had little faith in the ABS numbers and were instead looking to other surveys and indicators to get an idea of how the labour market was tracking.
"I'm just trying to close my eyes to them a little bit for a few months until we get over this situation and see what the ABS comes up with as an alternative way of measuring unemployment on a month by month basis," Mr de Garis said.
ANZ economists said more weight needed to be placed on other indicators of the labour market, which were showing signs of improvement.
The ABS drama would cause headaches for the Reserve Bank's interest rate deliberations, they said.
"This will also complicate the monetary policy decision making process in coming months, particularly given the RBA's reticence in the past to tighten monetary policy settings until the unemployment rate has at least stabilised," the economists said.
HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham said Thursday's figures suggested the unemployment rate had been stable at around six per cent over recent months.
"The RBA would no doubt have been looking at the panoply of labour market indicators and, while probably disappointed by the volatility of the official numbers, they are unlikely to have been perturbed," he said.
"There are a large collection of labour market indicators available for Australia and the RBA also has its own business liaison program."
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