 ANZ job ads for August rose 2.6%, after an upwardly revised +1.4% for July. Job ads are 36.1% higher than a year ago.

 Such solid job ad growth is expected to generate employment growth of around 3-3%/yr, lowering the unemployment rate to below 5% by year end.

 The Australian employment report for August is released Thursday. The job ads series supports ongoing strong employment growth (see chart). TD expects +55k, comprising 'underlying' jobs generation of 25k and election-related temporary employment of ~30k.

 On a Federal election day, 60,000-70,000 people work for the Electoral Commission. Most of these are employed for no longer couple of days, but many are required to stay longer to complete the count. We estimate that around half of these jobs may exist for long enough to be captured by the statistics.

 A chunk of these jobs are filled by people not ordinarily looking for work and therefore not normally counted in the labour force, hence a small rise in participation is likely as well as a small fall in the unemployment rate. The election impact is very hard to estimate and this is reflected in the range of analyst forecasts for headline employment growth (6k - 55k!).

 Whatever the impact of the election turns out to be, those effects will be reversed in the September data, settling us back to our recent 25k average rate of job creation.

For the markets:

 With North America out today, markets are very going to be very quiet. So far the Asian trading session has brought very little movement in the AUD, which is hovering around $US0.9150, a level which it hit after Friday's better than expected non-farm payrolls report.

 Similarly, the sell off in bonds following NFP on Friday saw Aussie 3-year yields jump 10bp on the open this morning and 3-years remain under pressure now trading above 4.5%. 10-year bonds are trading back above 4.9%. Roland Randall

Strategist, Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange