The return to strong wage rises still looks to be some way off as the latest labour force figures offer only the smallest of hopes that underemployment is falling. Overall there continues to be a high level of spare capacity in the labour market.

With the recent move of the Australian Bureau of Statistics to detail underemployment rates each month, we now can give it as much attention as the unemployment rate. But while this increased focus is very good given the importance underemployment has on wages growth, and also for highlighting the overall health of the economy, it also means we need to be careful in not getting too excited by its monthly changes.

Last week the latest labour force figures showed the underemployment rate fell 0.4% points – the second biggest monthly fall for over four years – to a rate of 8.2%.

This clearly is good news. A lower underemployment rate means fewer people are unhappy with the amount of hours they are working, and as a result people are less worried about the trade-off between more hours and better pay.

But alas that big fall was in the seasonally adjusted rate; the less erratic trend rate saw no change – indeed it has been at 8.3% for 10 straight months:

The seasonally adjusted rate jumps around a fair bit – even more so than the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate. Over the past five years the median change in the underemployment rate has been 0.14% points compared with just 0.07% points for unemployment.

So it pays not to get too excited by a one-month change, but this is the case even more so in the latest month.

When we look at the actual number of underemployed workers we see that in June there was a 4.2% fall – the biggest one-month fall since October 2014 and the second biggest fall for over 18 years:

Now that alone would have you questioning if it is more of a statistical flub than a reflection of reality, but just how wonky the figure is becomes even more clear when you break it down by states.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the number of underemployed workers in June fell across the nation by 49,000; but in Victoria alone the number fell by 53,600.

The 15.9% fall in Victorian underemployment was the biggest one-month fall in the state since 1988 and the second biggest fall in any mainland state for 30 years.

Underemployment actually rose by 0.6% elsewhere in the nation:

It looks like the big fall in June was mostly a statistical response to the big rise in May – in effect it was all a bit of noise.

So where does that leave us?

Well, because the underemployment rate has remained flat in trend terms over the past six months while the unemployment rate has risen, it means that there has been a slight narrowing of the two measures – although they remain much further apart than they once were:

But the rise in unemployment this year also means that underutilisation has increased – and increased mostly across all ages:

And with that increase comes the slackening of the labour market – more people wanting either more hours or any work at all. And when that occurs, the pressure for wages growth eases.

Given there was not much to begin with, that rather dashes any hopes that the slight improvement in wages growth that has occurred over the past year might continue.

And so in lieu of a wage rise the best we can hope for is more interest rate cuts.

Over the past two months there has been a large change in the outlook for rates.

In May, the outlook was for the cash rate to get to the current level of 1.0% only by the end of the year; now the expectation is for the cash rate to reach 0.75% by then and around a 50% chance of a further cut to 0.5% by this time next year:

But as Shane Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald has noted, those rate cuts are not going to help wages growth, especially while the number of unemployed and underemployed per job vacancy is rising:

The big statistical drop in underemployment in June could be a sign of a corner being turned and that things are about to improve, but this is a small hope as a more realistic view of the figures is that it was just a statistical flub in one state.

For workers the problem is that the period of falling underutilisation that occurred during 2017 and 2018 looks to have at best slowed and at worst halted completely. And given that even during these two improving years wages growth remained pitiful, there seems little hope that things will get better any time soon.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist