In an economy as varied as Australia’s, different sectors experience different demand for labour and, thus, different wage pressures. Amid ongoing wage stagnation, there’s talk of much-anticipated and welcome wages pressure building up in Sydney. But which sectors are most likely to get wage rises? With the overseas experience casting doubt on the traditional link between falling unemployment and wages growth, it’s hard to predict, but we can look at recent wages growth data across industries, states and territories to see where wages have been growing.

Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Wage Price Index data, it’s immediately clear what sectors have experienced even less growth than the rest of us: since 2013, the mining industry has had average annual wage growth of 1.9% — the second-worst result behind the more generic services sector, which had average growth each year of 1.7%. That poor performance comes after an earlier period of strong growth during the mining investment boom: wages in mining have grown 27% since 2009, one of the strongest performing sectors, but that growth petered out after 2013 (and continues to fall — despite the mining industry demanding the return of WorkChoices because apparently wages growth is too fast).

Another industry that has performed poorly not merely in the last couple of years but since 2009 has been construction. The government and employer groups have pushed the idea the CFMEU has been running amok driving up costs in construction. “If we had a more lawful construction sector, if the rule of law applied there would be more construction and more construction jobs, taxpayers would not be paying in excess of 30% more for projects like this,” the prime minister said last year.

But if taxpayers are being charged 30% more for projects than they should be — a claim for which there is no independent verification — the 30% isn’t going into the wages of CFMEU members. Wages in construction have averaged growth of 2.1% over the last four years, below the average level across private industry of 2.2%. Construction sector wage growth has also been below average for the period since 2009.

As the graph shows, utilities have been where what has passed for the action has been, with wages up nearly 31% since 2009 and an average annual rate of 2.9% since 2014 — the highest of any of the major industries examined (most of them private sector; public administration, education and health are all both public and private figures). Why have the electricity and water sectors seen something approaching what used to be normal wages growth? It’s especially confusing given employment in the sector has fallen in recent years — in 2012 it was around 150,000; in May this year it was down to 123,000. Stronger wages growth usually occurs in expanding industries, such as mining during the mining investment boom, when annual wages growth reached 5%.

A possible explanation is that the growth in investment in renewable energy in recent years has required more specialist skills from construction workers and workers operating solar and wind farm power generation infrastructure, pushing up the price of labour. If that’s the case, the lull in investment after 2013 when Tony Abbott declared war on renewables should have resulted in wages growth dropping in the years afterward as renewables projects dried up. And the out-performance of wages in utilities does come to a halt in the year to June, when growth was slower than in a number of other sectors.

Health and social care, the largest and one of the fastest growing sectors in terms of employment, has also had above-average growth (being dominated by the public sector helps), so too has education, which has also experienced strong growth over the last decade.

Western Australia has had the strongest state wage growth since 2009, and is also currently the state with the weakest growth: in the year to 2017, wages grew just 1.4% compared to 2% nationally; it was also the equal lowest state in 2015-16 and the lowest state in 2014-15. Surprisingly, South Australia and Tasmania had the highest growth in 2016-16, 2.2% — though it’s much of a muchness; NSW and Victoria were both 2% and Queensland 1.9%. Nationally, wage growth has fallen every year since 2011, when it was nearly double the 2016-17 result, at 3.8%. Will 2017-18 finally be the year the decline ends?