House of Representatives 25 August 2025
Speaker: The question is that the motion be agreed to. I call the Member for Fisher.
Andrew Wallace MP:
Thanks, Mr Deputy Speaker. I rise to speak proudly in relation to this motion.
This week is National Skills Week, but every week should be National Skills Week. Before coming into this place, I was a barrister. Before being a barrister, I was a carpenter, which meant I had to go to trade school. So I am TAFE educated, and I am a big supporter of technical and further education.
TAFE is a vital link to our prosperity, not just as a nation but also to individuals. The ability to get out, learn a trade, and then go anywhere in the world and be respected for it is incredibly important.
But there are very significant problems in this country. I want to take you, Mr Deputy Speaker, on a bit of a history lesson, because this goes all the way back to the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd Government. In those years we saw the onset of a philosophy that if you wanted to be someone, you needed to go to university. Everybody should go to university.
What we saw was a massive drop off in kids doing trades. What we are experiencing today is a knock-on effect of that philosophy. Around the kitchen table, parents talking to their kids would say: “What are you thinking of doing when you leave school, dear?” “I wouldn’t mind becoming a carpenter.” “Oh no, you don’t want to become a carpenter, you want to become a lawyer.” That rationale, that philosophy, seeped into this country and is causing us untold grief.
We now have a massive skills shortage in this country. If you listen to those members opposite, I would just pose this question: if the Government’s policy on free TAFE is working so well, why have apprenticeship numbers dropped by 103,000? When we left government there were 415,240 apprentices. Today there are just 311,760. That’s a drop of 103,000. Something is not working.
We talk about a skills crisis. We talk about a housing crisis. The two go hand in hand. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, Mr Deputy Speaker, as a carpenter and as a licensed builder, still currently a licensed builder, the skills shortage in Australia is dire.
Just because you offer someone a fee-free place at TAFE does not mean they will go on and take an apprenticeship. It does not mean the courses that fee-free TAFE is offering are aligned to the skills shortages industry needs to fill today. There are many courses that young people and older people alike can do at TAFE, but many of them are not what Australian employers are looking for.
If we do not marry the two, if we do not ask employers and work with employers about the types of skills they need and the shortages they are experiencing, then we will continue to fail. The Member for Grey just gave a great analogy about investing in buying a bigger pump and all you are doing is pumping water out of a cracked pipe. Very apt analogy.
The skills shortage works in conjunction with the housing crisis. The Government talks about building 1.2 million new homes. They have not got a snowball’s chance in hell of building 1.2 million homes. Everybody knows it. One of the main reasons they cannot do it is because of the skills shortage the building industry is experiencing.
I will tell you why else young girls in particular do not want to get a trade in the building industry: because they see the sort of appalling behaviour by the CFMEU on building sites every day. They say, “Why would I expose myself to that misogynism?” This from the Labor Party, who pride themselves on looking after women.
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