When job hunting is an endurance sport.

Unemployment in Australia is rising, and economists are relaxed about that generally, because it coincides with the end of the mining boom.

But new data out today show there is a hidden group for whom relaxation is just a dream – the long-term unemployed. The unemployment rate now sits at 5.8 per cent and rising, up from below 5 per cent in 2011. Getting a job is proving harder and harder:

The number of people starting new jobs (in the 12 months before the survey) is falling. It was 1.69 million in 2012, but had fallen to 1.67 million by 2013.

What that means is more and more people whose work skills are atrophying.

The proportion of unemployed people who had been looking for work for over 12 months has risen from 19.2 per cent in 2011 to 20.8 per cent in 2013.

And not all long-term unemployed people will show up in the figures. Some people will give up and disappear from the statistics if they stop seeking work, for example if they move onto the pension.

This is very bad news. Unemployment rates tend to rise sharply and fall slowly:

[It’s possible my entire interest in economics and statistics is because of the spike in the middle of the above graph. My first awareness of anything called the “economy” was the 1990s recession, which was also when I first heard the word “unemployment” and heard job losses discussed in hushed tones. I remember seeing newspaper articles about 11 per cent unemployment. Then my whole secondary schooling and university education coincided with the long, slow reversal of the unemployment caused by that short sharp recession.]

Unemployment is very hard to remove because of a concept called Hysteresis. It basically says that high unemployment is sticky – the economy “gets used to” functioning with more people out of work.

What that means is that a period of high unemployment is not just bad in the here and now. Its effects echo down through time in the shape of higher unemployment rates.

The Australian situation is still the envy of the world. Our unemployment rate is well below that in the US. But that is cold comfort when you are scanning the job ads for the 53rd luckless week in a row.

The data also contain another interesting tidbit:

66 per cent of people look for job ads in the newspaper, but 84 per cent of people look for job ads online.

But young people use the internet more, with 85 per cent of them looking for jobs online. But for the first time even those 45 years and over reported they are now most likely to look for jobs online, with 79 per cent scouring Seek, Monster, etc. (And that’s why the newspaper business is in so much strife)