This week’s latest labour force figures for December could see a decline in the jobless rate to 6.7 per cent from 6.8 per cent, a further pullback from the 7.5 per cent seen last June during the depths of recession.

“The jobs market has been very good,” Deloitte Access Economics partner and economist Chris Richardson told AAP.

“We already have six out of every seven of the initial job losses back.”

There are concerns about what impact the planned withdrawal of JobKeeper in March will have on employment and the economy more broadly.

“It’s always going to be a dangerous phase when JobKeeper comes off,” Mr Richardson said.

“It is genuinely looking less dangerous because we have done so well on jobs.”

However, releasing the Deloitte Access Economics quarterly business outlook on Monday, Mr Richardson expects wage and price pressures to keep “bumping along the bottom” for sometime.

He does not expect annual inflation to climb much until unemployment drops well under six per cent, which he doesn’t expect to happen until 2023.

Even then, annual wage growth is not expected to climb back above two per cent until 2024.

As such, any increase in the Reserve Bank’s cash rate from a record low 0.1 per cent is a long way into the future.

Still, Australia is one of just five nations who entered 2021 in relatively good shape – Taiwan, China, Vietnam and New Zealand being the others.

“COVID numbers are very low, the vaccine news is excellent, confidence is rebounding, Victoria is catching up to the recovery already underway elsewhere,” Mr Richardson said.

“Australia has made many mistakes in juggling COVID, but so far we’ve made fewer mistakes than most of the globe. You’d rather be here than almost anywhere else.”

Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers said the recovery in some parts of the economy is welcome.

“(But) the Morrison Government should not and cannot declare victory while more than two million Australians are either without a job or don’t have enough hours and wages are stagnant,” Dr Chalmers told AAP.