National Australia Bank say the main data interest will be in Wednesday's Construction Work Done
- Last quarter's +9% reading was bloated by the technical inclusion of the Darwin Ichthys Central Processing Facility as "construction", though there was no net GDP impact given it was imported.
- The Prelude FLNG platform arrived in Australian waters in July while the Ichthys' Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility arrived in August.
- We expect therefore to see that Q3's estimate was similarly bloated with a headline rise of 14% (though again there will be no impact to GDP from these imports).
- We will be paying close attention to the LNG-unrelated residential and non-residential building and public sector engineering work done segments that we expect to have supported growth and represent still strong domestic construction patterns. Anecdotally, with a very long period of dry weather in Queensland and NSW, there were minimal interruptions during Q3.
ANZ note that Construction is expected to post significant growth in Q3
- underlying construction still looks solid
- Housing construction is expected to post moderate growth after approvals rose in the quarter, while publicly funded work on road and rail projects should continue to rise
The data is due at 0030 GMT on Wednesday 22 November 2017. This is a bright spot for the Australian economy ... its the ongoing weakness in wage growth (noted again today by the RBA) that is not.
