These divergent trends since the mid 2000s stand in contrast to the period immediately before that, when there was less structural change. The overall impression from these various facts and figures is that the labour market has coped reasonably well with the significant changes taking place in the Australian economy.
As a consequence, just as had been the case in 2001, Australia experienced only a mild economic slowdown in 2008/09. The fact that Australia avoided the direct impact of both the tech crash and the sub-prime crisis obviously helps to explain why the Australian economy has done better than the US in the past decade.