The Bureau of Statistics has produced some shockers - wildly inaccurate employment statistics it has had to disown. But not this time.
An apparent employment surge in one month might be a statistical fluke, the result of a dodgy sample or flawed bad seasonal adjustment. But not a near-record surge that goes on for month after month, 14 of them in a row.
Over the past year a near-record 383,300 more Australians have been funnelled into employment, all but 87,700 of them full-time. In the past month (acknowledging the usual caveat) 61,600 were funnelled into work, all but 19,700 of them full-time.
We won't get the detailed breakdown until next week, but a look at the latest detailed breakdown we do have, for the year to August, shows that almost all of the jump in employment of 324,900 was in two industries: 'healthcare and social assistance' (130,600) and construction (104,400).
On Monday, Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas said the state was in the midst of a construction boom not seen since Premier Henry Bolte in the 1960s and 1970s. It's getting hard to find the right workers and hard to find steel and cement.
Much of it is the result of government road and rail projects, as in NSW. Much of that is due to the previous Australian treasurer Joe Hockey, who in 2014 awarded incentive payments to states that "recycled assets", selling roads and other things they owned in order to build new ones. Victoria and NSW started early, recycling some of their assets before the Commonwealth incentives.They made use of the riches that had been flooding in to their treasuries as Sydney and Melbourne property prices pushed stamp duty takings sky high.
Once it was thought that government investment "crowded out" the private sector. Not at the moment. It's because of the government investment programs that the private sector is investing too, building projects on contract, handing them over to state governments (which will later sell them) and then starting on the next one. The known pipeline stretches out beyond 2027.
It's not the same as widespread employment growth (employment in the finance sector and in administration went backwards) but it's worth having.
It's centred around Melbourne. More than half of those 61,600 extra workers found their jobs in Victoria. Over the past year more than one-third found their jobs in Victoria, 35 per cent when measured on a trend basis. Thirty per cent found their jobs in NSW.
Population figures also released on Thursday show Australians and foreigners pouring in to Victoria. In the past year its population has swelled 2.3 per cent. The rest of the country's has swelled 1.4 per cent.
Victoria's employment growth, as well as Australia's, reflects much more than more people. In the past year its employment-to-population ratio has climbed from 61.8 to 62.5 per cent. The NSW rate has climbed from 60.4 to 61.3 and the national rate from 61 to 61.9 per cent.
But Victoria's faster population growth has left it with a higher unemployment rate than NSW; 5.5 per cent instead of 4.6 per cent.
So good is that NSW 4.6 per cent figure, that Commonwealth Securities senior economist Ryan Felsman says it could be effectively considered "full employment". It's rare for an unemployment rate to stay below 5 per cent for long.
Australia's national rate is 5.4 per cent, heading down into territory not seen since the Gillard government and the second of Australia's two big mining booms.
Malcolm Turnbull is wrong to say that what's happening is "a direct result" of his government's policies, just as Gillard and John Howard were wrong to say that the earlier mining-related jobs booms were a result of their policies. But he might be more right than they were. What we are seeing is in large measure a government-related jobs boom. Turnbull and his Treasurer Scott Morrison owe Hockey a lot.
Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.
