The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia, March 2018 – today which showed that the Australian labour market has weakened further in the first three months of 2018 and is decidely weaker when compared to 2017. Employment growth was virtually zero (4,900 net increase) in March 2018 and participation fell, suppressing the otherwise inevitable rise in unemployment, which would have accompanied the weak employment growth. Unemployment fell slightly but only because the participation rate fell. Had the participation rate been constant across the months, the unemployment rate would have been 5.7 per cent rather than the official rate for March 2017 of 5.5 per cent. Further, underemployment rose marginally as did the broad labour underutilisation rate, which stands at 14.3 per cent (nearly 1.9 million workers are either without work or do not have sufficient hours of work. The teenage labour market was slightly improved. Overall, my assessment is that the Australian labour market has weakened again in March and remains a considerable distance from full employment. There is a lot of slack remaining and defies the foolish calls in recent days from those demanding reductions in the fiscal deficit.