CANBERRA – The Housing Industry Association has confirmed Australia is short 83,000 skilled tradies this week, prompting the federal government to launch yet another taskforce that will not consider hiring from any of the communities with the highest youth unemployment rates in the country.
“We’re going to look at fast-tracking skilled migration, raising apprentice wages by twelve dollars, running a TikTok campaign and possibly importing tradies from the Philippines,” said one Department of Skills strategy officer. “What we will not be doing is funding First Nations apprenticeship pathways at scale because that’s a separate portfolio and we don’t talk to them.”
Industry data shows just 4.5% of trade-qualified workers are women and roughly nobody knows what the Indigenous figure is because nobody collects it properly. Apprentice incentives were halved on 1 January this year, dropping from $5,000 to $2,500 per apprentice, which experts agree is a bold strategy when the entire industry is on fire.
A spokesperson from a peak industry body offered an explanation.
“There’s a perception that mob aren’t reliable on site” the spokesperson said. “We base this perception on roughly zero data, decades of not actually employing many and one bloke in 2003 named Trevor.”
Master Builders Australia recently confirmed migrants who arrived in the past five years make up only 2.8% of the construction workforce, suggesting the real shortage is not workers but employers willing to train them.
A Northern Territory employment program reported 47 Aboriginal teenagers had completed pre-apprenticeship cert programs last year. Of those, four secured ongoing apprenticeships. The other 43 were told to “keep applying” and are now stacking shelves at IGA.
Industry leaders have promised to solve the crisis by 2030, the same deadline they set in 1995.
Discover more from I-News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
