Northern Tasmania has joined Hobart in a jobs boom.
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However, the North-West has lost an estimated 1000 jobs in a year.
Employment in Launceston and the North-East increased by 1900 to 67,200 on a monthly average basis in the year to the end of December,state Treasury analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics original terms data showed.
That left Northern jobs growth on a similar trajectory to the South, which started a jobs boom in early 2017.
Northern jobs slumped in 2015 and dipped again last year, but have picked up at increasing speed in recent times.
The North-West and West Coast averaged about 50,300 jobs per month in the year to the end of December.
That was down from a monthly average of 51,300 in the previous year.
The South’s monthly jobs average increased by 5800 to 127,000 in the year to December.
In his 2017 Tasmania Report, economist Saul Eslake said Northern unemployment fell by more than 1 percentage point in 2016-17.
He said that was “largely because most of the newly created jobs appear to have gone to people already actively looking for work, rather than to new entrants to the labour force”.
“The opposite appears to have occurred in the North-West and West, where the slow-down in employment growth has been paralleled by a decline in the participation rate ...”
“The ‘employment rate’ of people aged 15 and over is more recently once again lower than in Tasmania’s other regions, as it has been for most of the past 15 years.”
Shadow Treasurer Scott Bacon said the figures were very concerning for the North-West.
“Of the three regions, the North-West is the only part of the state to go backwards for the second consecutive year in terms of employment,” Mr Bacon said.
”It's something the Liberal government is too afraid to even talk about.
“Labor, on the other hand, wants to tackle the challenge head-on.
“The Liberals' failure to invest in infrastructure during the first 12 months of governing is coming back to bite them.”
Liberal MHA Roger Jaensch said Mr Bacon had a hide to talk about the North-West unemployment rate.
“The current North-West and West Coast rate of around 6 per cent is way down on the shocking 9.1 per cent it averaged in the last year under Labor and the Greens,” Mr Jaensch said.
“But we know we can still do better, which is why we’ve set a new target to have the lowest unemployment rate of all states, backed by policies including payroll tax rebates for apprentices.
“We’ll have more to say about North-West jobs during the election campaign.”