The move from the investment to the production phase of the mining boom is freeing up and will continue to free up labour to move back into the non-resource sectors of the economy. This has weighed on wage growth across the economy and is likely to do so for a while yet.
Graph 14  The slowing in wage growth across all industries has meant that firms have experienced relatively slow growth in their labour costs. This is more striking after accounting for the growth in the productivity of labour, which as I’ve already noted has picked up somewhat compared with the pace we had become accustomed to over much of the 2000s.