More Australians are returning from the Middle East despite air space briefly being closed due to renewed missile strikes in the region.

A flight from Dubai to Melbourne with 151 Australians on board is due to arrive on Sunday afternoon, while another flight will land in Sydney later in the evening.

A further two flights are expected to leave Dubai, pending the United Arab Emirates’ airspace remaining open.

The departures follow Dubai’s international airport being briefly closed on Saturday night, Australian time, after the latest round of Iranian missile and drone attacks in the region.

More than 1500 Australians have arrived home on flights from the UAE since international services resumed.

Australians have also been bussed out of the Qatari capital Doha, the base for Virgin Australia’s partner Qatar Airways, to Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh.

Three buses carrying 92 Australian citizens, permanent residents and their families have departed.

Assistant Foreign Minister Matt Thistlethwaite said commercial flights were still the best way for Australians to leave the Middle East.

But he admitted the cost of some flights might be a factor in people not being able to return, with some planes departing with large numbers of empty seats.

“We’ve seen that some of those flights haven’t been full. We’ve seen the cost of tickets,” he told Sky News on Sunday.

“We’re pretty disappointed to be honest and we’ve made that disappointment known to the airlines.”

“The first thing is to maintain your booking on your flight. If you’ve already got one booked, then they shouldn’t be able to jack up the prices.”

Some 115,000 Australians were in the Middle East when the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran returned fire in retaliation across the region.

Australian Travel Industry Association chief executive Dean Long said flights leaving with empty seats should not be a concern.

“The good news is there’s not a huge number of people that we should consider stuck in the transit hub,” he told AAP.

“The people that are primarily in the Middle East now are choosing to be in the Middle East because that’s where they live.”

Meanwhile, federal government ministers have downplayed the presence of three Australian defence personnel on a US nuclear submarine when it struck an Iranian ship near Sri Lanka.

Mr Thistlethwaite said it was a normal rotation for the defence crews as part of the AUKUS security pact, but would not say how senior the personnel were.

Opposition frontbencher Claire Chandler said the coalition was supportive of the role Australian defence crews were playing.

“It’s fair to expect that our Australian Navy personnel would be working with US counterparts, particularly within the context of AUKUS,” she said.

Natalie MacDonald was six weeks back from maternity leave when a group email landed at 1am saying she’d been made redundant.

After seven years at global tech company LinkedIn, the 36-year-old Sydney mum’s role as a senior news editor was one of many scrapped as the organisation leaned into artificial intelligence investment.

Australian-headquartered companies have flagged similar cuts.

Logistics technology provider WiseTech will slash 2000 roles as part of its AI transformation, while Commonwealth Bank and Telstra have announced hundreds of roles will go.

Roughly one in three Australians are worried they will lose their job to AI in the next five years, according to research by Ranstad.

When the bad news hit Ms McDonald’s inbox in May 2025, she was in a good place in herself.

“People talk about the multiple stages of grief you go through when you are made redundant and I fortunately never had that bit of shame attached,” she tells AAP.

“I was always really confident in the fact I was good at my job, the work I did aligned with my values, I had left nothing on the table.”

She set about leveraging her 35,000 LinkedIn followers and 115,000 newsletter subscribers to launch Working @ It.

The consultancy helps organisations and leaders with brand narrative and messaging, and supports individuals to future-proof themselves in a rapidly changing world.

Since launching the company in August, Ms MacDonald has helped over 200 people through workshops or one-on-one training.

She’s appeared on podcasts and supported clients from PR firms, to political leaders and athletes.

People who lose their job but have given their best should be confident it isn’t their fault, she says.

“This wasn’t about you; you are one cog in a big machine.

“It was your role that was eliminated.”

Ms MacDonald recommends employees attend industry events and conferences to get a sense of what leaders think are the future skills they’ll need.

It is also crucial to continue building professional networks.

“It’s that network that is potentially going to connect you with your next role,” Ms MacDonald says.

“So, recognising that idea of controlling the things that you can control and the knowledge you’re taking, on and how you demonstrate your own expertise outwardly.”

Humans have several advantages over AI, such as strategic thinking, culture-setting and asking follow-up questions.

“It is also being able to hear what’s not being said in a room, as much as what is being said,” Ms MacDonald says.

One in three Australians believe their job prospects have worsened during the past year, according to Ranstad research.

However, businesses are also seeking human skills alongside technical know-how and proficiency in AI tools, according to Ranstad’s public sector and business support director Amelia O’Carrigan.

“Employers are looking for skills like analytical thinking, someone’s natural curiosity, their lifelong learning, their creative thinking, their agility, their flexibility,” she tells AAP.

Ranstad’s research found mid-career Generation X (aged 46-61) and Millennials (30-45) are the most concerned about their jobs disappearing.

Conversely, most baby boomers (62-80) are either in or approaching retirement or working senior roles that depended on human judgment and critical thinking.

Generation Z, aged roughly between 14 and 29, are less concerned and viewed as highly flexible, tech savvy and open to taking on different and sometimes multiple roles.

Ultimately, layoffs are inevitable, according to David Phillips, partner marketing, data and technology lead at Deloitte Australia

“There can’t not be an impact on the number and the type of people you employ,” he says.

However, even Agentic AI – autonomous systems more advanced than the first two AI “epochs” of machine learning and large language models – still need humans to oversee the technology’s output.

“Even if you are getting really high … results, we would always recommend keeping a human in the loop, particularly as it relates to anything that touches customers but also middle and back office,” Mr Phillips says.

Smart companies will continue investing in people but to play a more strategic role in thinking about clients, customers and bigger problems within organisations, he says.

In-store retail staff, already in short supply across Australia, are unlikely to be impacted by the technology.

In the future, AI agents will likely assist both businesses and individuals as employees, planners and shopping assistants, providing an “infinite workforce” at any single person’s disposal, Mr Phillips says.

“What that means as individuals move out of the more menial day-to-day tasks, is that they should have greater oversight of what’s coming through that machinery,” he says.

“I don’t think anyone in the world’s recommending removing humans from the loop right now, certainly not us.”

Back in Sydney, Ms Macdonald is working with multiple teams at a television network, the latest in a long and varied line of jobs through her consultancy.

“What I’m doing at the moment is is a bit of a portfolio career,” she says.

“In a way, I’m still figuring it out.”

The Liberal Party has fallen behind in reaching younger voters, its new leader concedes, but the focus will be on changing its campaigning strategies rather than policies.

Angus Taylor used his first major speech to the party faithful on Saturday to outline a digital-first campaign strategy to reach voters long before the next election.

Targeted messages to show disillusioned voters the Liberals are a party for all will be the focus of his leadership, Mr Taylor told the NSW Liberal State Council.

“We’ve fallen behind in collecting and using data and we’ve fallen behind in reaching Australians where they are – their phones, in their feeds and in the online spaces where views are shaped well before an election occurs,” Mr Taylor said.

The Liberals have long understood they need to appeal to younger voters to remain relevant in the political landscape.

The latest Redbridge poll on Sunday showed support for the party at less than 15 per cent among generation Z and millennial voters.

Mr Taylor admitted the party made mistakes leading up to the 2025 election.

Chief among them was a failure to announce policies with enough time for voters to consider them, something he has vowed to rectify.

Persuading younger demographics the Liberals are a viable electoral option will be Mr Taylor’s defining challenge as leader.

“The Liberal Party must attract, must retain and must empower dedicated Australians from all walks of life,” he said.

“We must return to being a grassroots … party that is a natural home to everyday Australians.”

While the campaigning strategy looked ahead, many of the policies flagged by Mr Taylor echoed culture war issues already deemed unsavoury by much of the electorate.

He called for the “elimination of classroom indoctrination” and said part of his mission was to emphasise the importance of “standing in front of an Australian flag”.

The eradication of the “nanny state” was also floated as a result of a future coalition government.

With a threat from One Nation lurking on the party’s right, Mr Taylor was keen to spruik immigration as a key concern.

“Numbers are too high and standards are too low,” he said.

Islamist extremism was singled out, with Mr Taylor saying the repatriation of any of the women and children in Syria “must never happen”.

Mr Taylor repeatedly paid tribute to NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane, particularly her efforts to drive housing policy.

However, Ms Sloane did not mention her federal counterpart during her speech, choosing instead to focus on her more imminent election challenge in March 2027.

“It has been 100 years since a first-term government was overturned in New South Wales,” she said at the council.

“But … change is required in NSW, because the reality is that in our state, too many people feel like they’re playing a game that they can’t win.”

Both leaders will hope the rousing receptions they received from the party faithful in Sydney are a much-needed good omen for their futures.

Australians stranded in Qatar will soon be able to bus to Saudi Arabia as the federal government works to bring citizens home safely from the Middle East.

With Qatari airspace closed, Assistant Immigration Minister Matt Thistlethwaite said bus transfers from Doha to Riyadh would become available.

“We’ve made a safety assessment that the opportunity for people to return home is much better in Riyadh, because there’s larger openings of airspace,” the assistant minister told reporters on Saturday.

Once in the Saudi Arabian city, travellers will need to secure seats on commercial flights back to Australia.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will provide “basic” accommodation support.

Bus transits out of Kuwait are also being considered.

Mr Thistlethwaite said the government was exploring “all options” to return thousands of Australians stranded due to the conflict, including government-commissioned repatriation flights.

For now, commercial flights remain the best option.

“The Australian consular officials in the region and DFAT officials here at home are working 24/7 to ensure that we can do all we can to support Australians to return home,” Mr Thistlethwaite said.

The comments follow claims by exhausted Australians returning from the strife-torn region that airlines have been of more help to them than the government.

The first flight to Australia from Abu Dhabi landed in Sydney on Friday morning with only a third of its seats filled.

Etihad EY450 passenger Julie Pearce questioned whether the government was working with airlines to fill the few planes leaving.

She said she was only able to get on the 300-seat Boeing Dreamliner through her daughter, who used to work for the Emirati airline and had a connection.

“They could have got a lot of people on there this morning and they didn’t,” Ms Pearce said.

Fellow passenger Trudy Schipelliti also questioned efforts to fill the planes.

“It was pretty disgusting because there are a lot of people waiting to get out,” she said.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she was disappointed at reports flights were arriving with hundreds of empty seats.

Twelve regional countries have been attacked by Iran in the past week, including Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

As of Saturday morning Sydney time, 1324 Australians had returned on eight flights from the Middle East since Wednesday.

Further services are scheduled, subject to increased drone and missile activity, from Dubai to both Sydney and Melbourne on Saturday.

The department has meanwhile opened registrations for its Crisis Portal for Australians in Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon, in addition to Iran, Israel, Qatar and the UAE.

Smartraveller continues to advise Australians not to travel to Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, the UAE and Yemen.

The federal opposition has called for government-commissioned repatriation flights.

There are 24,000 Australian travellers and residents in the UAE, with about 115,000 across the broader Middle East.

Charlotte Ancell had done everything had been expected of her.

She attended a prestigious all-girls school after her family pulled together to fund her enrolment. She worked hard, finished with a good score and went to university – following a well-worn path to a professional career.

But something wasn’t sitting right.

“I’m not sure where it came from but I remember crying about my future and not knowing what to do and calling my mum and bursting out, ‘I just want to be a tradie!’ Ms Ancell, 23, told AAP.

Without anyone in her family or close community working in a trade, Ms Ancell had to fight hard to recalibrate the trajectory of her career.

“My school had a very narrow view of what success looked like. It was a very academic environment,” she said.

“The word TAFE was laughed at – people would scoff at you if you mentioned you might want to go to TAFE because university was really the only path that was encouraged.”

It definitely wasn’t something she considered growing up.

Yet she had always been drawn to hands-on work and knew she didn’t want to work in an office, so after her moment of clarity, Ms Ancell quit her degree and began applying for apprenticeships. 

But breaking into the industry wasn’t straightforward.

“I applied for about a year and I got rejected over and over again because I had no experience,” she said.

Eventually, a skills and aptitude test resulted in an interview and an apprenticeship with builders and fitters specialists Rintoul followed.

Now in the third year of a Certificate III in shopfitting through TAFE NSW, Ms Ancell is working on major construction projects and thriving in a field she once never imagined entering.

Her story reflects a broader shift taking place across the industry.

Data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research shows the number of women enrolling in construction trades courses in NSW has more than doubled in the five years to 2025.

The figures come as the sector marks Women in Construction Week from March 1 to 7 before International Women’s Day on March 8.

Despite the growing numbers, construction remains heavily male-dominated, and Ms Ancell said entering the industry could still feel daunting.

“There’s always an anxiety going into it, knowing that in every room you’re going to be a minority,” she said.

“But it’s definitely daunting and incredibly rewarding.”

She said the experience had helped build her confidence.

“My self-assuredness has gone up exponentially,” she said.

Ms Ancell said supportive colleagues and teachers had played a major role in helping her settle into the industry.

“The teachers at TAFE are incredibly supportive of women,” she said.

Executive director of teaching and learning in construction and energy at TAFE NSW, Jennifer Perkins – herself a qualified electrician – said increasing female participation was essential to meeting workforce demand.

“TAFE NSW is training the majority of women entering construction-based trades in Sydney, and increasing female participation isn’t just important, it’s essential to meeting industry demand and growing the workforce,” she said.

“More women on worksites strengthens teams, boosts productivity and supports the long-term future of the industry.”

NSW Skills and TAFE Minister Steve Whan said encouraging more women into trades would help address labour shortages.

“The construction industry needs more skilled workers and supporting more women to enter, train and thrive in the sector is critical to meeting that demand,” he said.

They say you can smell the fish from the harbour on a windy day in Esbjerg, but smell the money everyday.

The Danish seaside city, comparable in size to Coffs Harbour with a population of about 70,000, is known for successfully reinventing itself. 

In the 1960s and 70s, it was a commercial seafood hub supporting 2000 fishermen, 670 vessels and 10,000 fishing-related jobs.

Moves to rein in overfishing compelled a scale back and these days there are only 10 active vessels and 500 jobs, mostly in processing.

Hit with crisis and forced to grapple with its over-dependence on imported oil, Denmark introduced car-free Sundays amid soaring prices in 1973.

In response, Esbjerg Port pivoted in the 1980s and 90s to “black gold”, servicing the rigs as the oil and gas industry took off in the North Sea.

Money also flowed and the city soon had more BMWs per capita than anywhere else in the nation.

By the early 1990s, as climate science firmed, Denmark introduced a carbon tax and built the world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby. 

A decade later, Esbjerg too saw the future and today boasts the world’s largest offshore wind port.

“(In Australia) your mindset is still the black versus the green energy but this is gone in Denmark, it’s just energy,” says its chief operating officer, Jesper Banks, joking that his country is “colour blind”.

“It’s not that we have been green-minded in any way; we’ve just been looking for opportunities.

“We’ve been open-minded, we want our pay cheque. At the end of the day, it’s about money.”

The port is booked up until 2032 to service vessels installing wind turbines, as Europe races to install 10,000 of them in the North Sea to boost offshore energy capacity to at least 150 GW by 2050.

This will supply up to 230 million households.

The port is proactive about its future, regularly bussing in high school students on excursions to get a taste of lucrative high-tech careers in AI, big data, engineering, logistics, construction, legal, maintenance, welding, transport and mechanics.

Former master mariner Kurt Mathiesen has worked there for 36 years and seen firsthand the skill transfer from fishing to oil and gas and then wind.

There are presently about 30 boats dedicated to taxiing turbine technicians out to the offshore farms at 6am and collecting them at day’s end.

He expects that number to ramp up to 200.

“A lot of former fishermen are working as a captain or a mate on board of the vessels taking people out because those fishermen know how to react in the North Sea,” Mr Mathiesen says.

“It’s dangerous; big waves and a lot of traffic. They know how to operate in those waters.”

A tour of the port makes it clear Denmark invented Lego: pre-assembled turbine towers are loaded onto a jack-up ship called the Wind Keeper and dozens of 115-metre-long turbine blades are stacked neatly on racks.

When Tasmania’s Danish Queen Mary arrives home on a state visit on March 14, she will travel with a delegation of 55 companies, many representing movers and shakers behind Denmark’s energy transition.

While Australia’s Liberal and National parties tie themselves in knots over a 2050 net-zero emissions target, ambitious Denmark, which emits 0.1 per cent of global greenhouse gases compared to Australia’s 1.1 per cent, aims to go to net negative by 2050.

Two Danish companies, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and energy giant Orsted, want to build major offshore projects off Gippsland in Victoria.

Both are presently at feasibility stage.

Towns between Wilsons Promontory and Lakes Entrance might soon get the chance to emulate Esbjerg’s wind energy boom.

The Victorian government says its declared offshore wind area can potentially create 15,000 construction jobs and 7500 ongoing positions.

Orsted’s APAC President Per Mejnert Kristensen says Gippsland’s coast offers “Goldilocks conditions”.

“Gippsland has many of the fundamentals required to make offshore wind feasible and viable,” he tells a group of Australian reporters in Copenhagen.

“It has very good and consistent wind speeds, it has relatively shallow waters so you can use bottom-fixed technology, it is relatively closely located to off take and on top of that there is an existing grid.”

Export and Investment Fund of Denmark chief operating officer Peter Boeskov says it sees Australia as an attractive and reliable investment destination and has an unused country limit of $A10 billion.

For Denmark’s Climate and Energy Minister Lars Aagaard, countries that believe in science should work together.

“This change we will make in our (energy) system, decarbonising, it’s not something an individual country or region has a monopoly on,” he says.

“We are seeking partners, we are seeking business opportunities. I truly believe it is a two-way street.

“I think we will all be winners if we succeed in building more resilient, more secure decarbonised energy systems.” 

A green energy transition requires political courage and Denmark has a lot of know-how to share on managing a grid with renewables, according to Danish Industry senior vice president Troels Ranis.

“We know what we are good at,” he tells AAP.

“We know what we can deliver: cheap energy for offshore wind.”

In December, Orsted was burned by the Trump Administration.

The Americans suspended leases on five offshore wind farms including the company’s multi-billion dollar Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects near Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York. 

The delays cost the company up to $2.5 million a day, according to media reports. 

US courts have since granted preliminary injunctions, giving the green light for construction to resume but the long-term damage to investor sentiment remains unclear.

Asked about Australian democracy’s track record of yo-yoing between climate action and undoing climate action, Mr Aagaard says if it wants a cheap energy transition, trust is everything.

“You can very, very rapidly destroy the trust of the private sector to invest in your country. It takes years to build trust,” he says.

“If you mess up their trust … what would the private sector do?

“Either they are not going to invest or they will increase the risk permit … all the costs for wind turbines, most of the cost is when you construct and install it.

“Therefore, the cost of capital is extremely important if you want a cheap green transition.

“If you are a clever government, you are concerned about the trust.”

Back at the port, Mr Mathiesen adjusts his fluorescent jacket collar in the wind and marvels at the turbine towers in a way that would make powerline-enthusiast Darryl Kerrigan, from 1997 film The Castle, proud.

“When a turbine has run for eight minutes, it can supply my wife and my household with electricity for one year,” he says.

Lisa Martin travelled across Denmark as a guest of a Danish Foreign Ministry’s media program.

The United States customs agency is readying a system within 45 days to process refunds on US ‌President Donald Trump’s tariffs that were struck down as illegal and importers will not have to sue for them, a customs official ‌has said in a court filing.

The declaration by Brandon Lord, a top Customs and Border Protection official, came as government lawyers ‌were meeting with a federal trade judge to hammer out a process for returning $US166 billion ($A236 billion) in tariff payments to about 330,000 importers.

The tariffs that were a central part of Trump’s economic policy were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last month.

However, the Supreme Court did not say how the collected tariffs should be refunded, worrying small importers ‌that the process would ‌be prohibitively expensive ⁠and time-consuming.

“This new process will require minimal submission from importers,” Lord said in his ​declaration, which was filed with the US Court of International Trade just as government lawyers began meeting with Judge Richard Eaton of the US Court of International Trade.

Eaton called the meeting to discuss how the government will carry out his sweeping order issued on Wednesday directing the CBP to begin refunding tariffs to potentially hundreds of thousands of importers using the agency’s existing internal process.

Lord said the customs agency anticipated the refund process would require ‌importers ​to file a declaration with the CBP’s computer system known as ACE detailing tariff payments, and the system and CBP would ​then validate those ‌and process refunds with interest.

Each importer would receive a single payment from the Treasury Department, regardless of how many separate ​entries of goods the importer had made.

Lord did not estimate how long it would take to process the refunds but said the CBP would not be able to comply with Eaton’s order from Wednesday.

Eaton contemplated a ​system ​in which refunds would be automatically returned to ​importers through the existing system without documentation or input from the importer.

“Its ‌existing administrative procedures and technology are not well-suited to a task of this scale and will require manual work that will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency’s trade enforcement mission,” Lord said in explaining why the agency could not use its existing system.

He said more than 330,000 importers had paid an estimated $US166 billion in tariffs on more than 53 million ​shipments.

Eaton’s order would have required the agency to manually review paperwork on every shipment, a process Lord said ​would require more than four million ⁠hours of labour.

Australian corporations are back in the winner’s circle.

With the big banks, goldminers and critical minerals leading the way, local companies have delivered strong earnings this reporting season.

Nearly half all companies bettered expectations and the ratio of beats to misses was the best since 2021, according to AMP chief economist Shane Oliver.

“We’ve had in Australia three years in a row of falling listed company earnings and finally we’ve got a return to profit growth,” Dr Oliver said.

Two-thirds of companies increased their earnings from a year ago and 56 per cent raised their dividend, usually a sign their earnings would continue to rise, he said.

“So overall … it was a pretty good reporting season.”

IG market analyst Hebe Chen broadly agrees.

The overarching takeaway wasn’t necessarily explosive growth but institutional durability, he told AAP.

“Margins held, balance sheets remained fortress-like and guidance, while appropriately cautious, steered clear of the aggressive downgrades that typically cap market rallies.”

The results reinforce the growing conviction Australia’s economy is absorbing the twin pressures of inflation and restrictive rates far better than initially anticipated, Ms Chen said.

The undisputed outperformer of the half was the banking sector, Ms Chen said.

Commonwealth Bank and NAB showed resilient net interest margin, a key measure of a bank’s profitability, along with disciplined cost hygiene and steady loan books.

Those fundamentals not only justified their premium valuation but turned the sector into a magnet for defensive capital flows, she said.

“We have all been stunned by the big four banks this earnings season,” said VanEck cross-asset investment strategist Anna Wu, noting CBA’s shares rose as high as eight per cent on the day it reported earnings.

Banks’ valuations are stretched but interest rate hikes are boosting their margin potentials, Ms Wu said.

Australia’s economy is also proving resilient and loan arrears are dropping.

“I think all of these play into a good short-term outlook for banks,” she said.

VanEck believes 2026 will be a good year for Australia’s banks before their valuations become an issue in 2027.

Mining companies also did very well this earning season, mostly on the back of higher commodity prices.

“Gold and critical minerals are two of the probably most talked about buzzwords towards the end of last year and heading into this year,” Ms Wu noted.

Gold was changing hands at $US5,135 an ounce on Friday, up around 75 per cent from a year ago, while critical minerals like rare earths, lithium and copper have been surging.

Dr Oliver said mining companies got a boost in 2022 from the Ukraine war but had had some rough years since.

“Mining company profits have gone from about minus 17 per cent a year ago to plus 33 per cent, to a big turnaround there,” he said.

Ms Wu said unlike in the financial sector, materials companies are still trading at a very reasonable valuation level.

She and VanEck colleague, senior portfolio manager Cameron McCormack, said the fund manager was a fan of materials and select industrial companies.

The biggest holding in its actively managed exchange traded fund, known by its ticker symbol ALFA, is actually Telstra Group, in part because it is a “very, very strong operator in the Australian market” with strong pricing power, Mr McCormack said.

Telstra shares performed strongly during reporting season, he noted.

On the flip side, consumer discretionary companies did not fare as well, with Wesfarmers, Harvey Norman and Flight Centre slipping on the back of results.

Ms Chen said consumer-facing names were bearing the brunt of macro headwinds, with discretionary retailers and travel-linked stocks flagging softening demand and margin compression.

“This divergence highlights a clear squeeze,” Ms Chen said.

“While the corporate engines are humming, the Australian consumer is finally starting to feel the weight of elevated living costs.”

US employers unexpectedly cut 92,000 jobs last month in a sign that the labour market remains under strain.

The unemployment rate blipped up to 4.4 per cent.

The US Labor Department reported on Friday that hiring deteriorated from January, when companies, non-profits and government agencies added a healthy 126,000 jobs.

Economists had expected 60,000 new jobs in February.

Revisions also cut 69,000 jobs from December and January payrolls.

The job market had been expected to rebound this year from a lacklustre 2025 when the economy, buffeted by US President Donald Trump’s erratic tariff policies and the lingering effects of high interest rates, generated just 15,000 jobs a month. 

And January hiring had come in above expectations. 

“Just when it looked like the labour market was stabilising, this report delivers a knock-down blow to that view,” said Olu Sonola, head of US economics at Fitch Ratings. 

“It’s bad news whichever way you look at it.”

The job losses were widespread. 

Construction companies cut 11,000 jobs last month, which likely reflects reflect frigid weather. 

Healthcare firms shed 28,000 jobs after a four-week strike by more than 30,000 nurses and other front-line workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii. 

Healthcare has been one of the US job market’s strong points.

Factories cut 12,000 jobs and have lost jobs for 14 of the last 15 months.

Restaurants and bars lost nearly 30,000 jobs.

Administrative and support services firms lost nearly 19,000 jobs and courier and messenger services almost 17,000.

Financial firms added 10,000 jobs although job cuts continue to hit that sector as well this year. 

Average hourly wages rose 0.4 per cent from January and 3.8 per cent from a year earlier.

Hiring continues to lag far behind the hiring boom of 2021-2023 when the economy was bouncing back from pandemic lockdowns and the United States was adding nearly 400,000 jobs a month.

Many economists describe today’s job market as “no-hire, no-fire”: companies are reluctant to add workers but do not want to let go of the ones they have.

Luckily, achieving good-enough job growth is easier these days.

Until a year or two ago, employers needed to hire more than 100,000 people a month to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

But Baby Boomer retirements and the administration’s deportations mean there are fewer people competing for work. 

So the break-even point is much lower – anywhere from zero to 50,000 jobs a month, said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the tax and consulting firm RSM.

“Under the current conditions, 70,000 should be considered solid,” he said.

Companies may be holding off on hiring as they buy, install and figure out how best to use new technologies, including artificial intelligence.

AI, after all, potentially means they “can do more with less'” and will need fewer workers, especially for entry-level positions, Brusuelas said.

They are thinking, he said, “we’ve invested an awful lot of money in (capital expenditures), and we need to see how much we can produce with our current labour force … The last thing you want to do is hire a lot of young people and then let them go”.

German media group Axel Springer has agreed to buy the owner of the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom, the companies say.

The 575 million pounds ($A1.1 billion) agreement ends a long saga over ownership of the Telegraph Media Group, which publishes the 171-year-old Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister paper.

Axel Springer said it will invest in the group “to enable it to become the leading centre-right media outlet in the English-speaking world”.

“More than 20 years ago, we tried to acquire The Telegraph and did not succeed. Now our dream comes true,” Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said.

The German company owns titles including the popular Bild tabloid and Welt newspaper as well as Business Insider and Politico.

“The Telegraph stands for freedom, personal responsibility, democratic values and a belief in open societies and market economies. These convictions closely align with our Axel Springer essential values,” Döpfner said.

The agreement follows years of uncertainty over the papers’ future and scuttles a rival bid by the owner of the Daily Mail to buy the Telegraph titles.

The Telegraph group, previously owned by the Barclay family, was put up for sale in 2023 to help pay off the family’s debts. 

There was an offer to buy the publications from RedBird IMI, a consortium backed by RedBird Capital Partners and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and the vice president of the United Arab Emirates.

The consortium pulled out in 2024 following strong opposition from the UK government, which launched legislation to block foreign state ownership of the local press.

with DPA