With wages growth still far below the levels the Reserve Bank wants to see, the Morrison government has opened the way to businesses to use temporary foreign labour to push slowly building wage pressures back down, in the hope 200,000 temporary visa holders enter the country between December 1 and July 2022.

The government has nominated politically influential or sensitive sectors like mining, hospitality, construction and professional services as areas in which the demand for skilled workers is heavy.

Private sector wages growth in the September quarter was just 0.6%, and 2.4% for the year — the level it reached before the pandemic. Of the sectors Morrison nominated, professional services is the only sector that enjoyed what is by recent standards healthy growth — 1.3% in the quarter for the private sector, though it enjoyed similar growth at the end of 2020 before it slumped again earlier this year.

Hospitality (accommodation and food services) and construction wages grew at 1% in the quarter, which would have been par a decade ago under Labor; mining grew at just 0.4%, pretty much the same level it’s been stuck at for the last five years. Indeed, according to workforce data for the August quarter also published last week, mining shrank in size during that quarter.

That means that only the most successful sector, professional services, enjoyed annual wages growth higher than CPI — by 0.4%. Transport, another sector said to be facing skill shortages, also saw 1% wages growth, though the huge retail sector only saw growth of 0.5%, reflecting the impact of lockdowns.

So while the evidence is mixed, it does bear out that employer complaints of skill shortages in specific sectors are beginning to translate into wages growth, but mostly not enough to keep pace with inflation, and mostly not back to the strong levels of growth workers enjoyed prior to the wage stagnation that set in around 2013. And not enough to affect overall wage levels, which remain at stagnation levels.

But in the government’s view, and certainly that of employers, it’s time to add 200,000 temporary workers to areas like hospitality, construction and professional services.

There remain other workforce issues, however, that shouldn’t be overlooked. As a proportion of the workforce, health and caring reached a new record in the August quarter, hitting 14.4%. At current rates of growth, over 2 million Australians will work in the sector in 2023.

Within that category, childcare employment reached a new record high, and residential care reversed the pandemic-induced decline it has been experiencing for two years now — though residential care, which is the aged care and residential disability care sector, is now only back to where it was in 2017.

That’s despite the urgent need for more staff and higher pay in the sector identified by the aged care royal commission and notionally backed by the government, and the existence of an Aged Care Workforce Industry Council established by this government in 2019 to address decades-long workforce issues.

The government committed in its response to the royal commission to implement one of the recommended staffing standards by October 2023, with funding to start next year. Where the additional staff to achieve the required minimum 200 minutes of care a day will come from has never been explained; the Abbott government’s response to workforce issues in the sector was to abolish plans to increase pay and urge employers to import temporary labour.

The Fair Work Commission has dragged its heels on a case to increase sector pay by 25%, and that won’t be resolved until the second half of 2022. The issue seems to have fallen entirely off the political radar despite a lack of clear progress from the government.

What’s also noticeable is that manufacturing appears to be turning around as a source of employment. After regularly falling below 900,000 workers in recent years, on a seasonally adjusted basis, employment went back over 1 million in the August quarter — the highest seasonally adjusted figure since the Labor years, and the fourth quarter of growth in the last five. Most of the growth is in heavy manufacturing — metal fabrication and transport equipment, where employment is at its highest levels in years.

For a country that flagellates itself regularly because it “doesn’t make anything any more”, it’s an interesting turnaround, though whether it is sustained as global supply chains begin to work normally again remains to be seen.