Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Skills and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to call out this government's failure on employer incentives for apprentices. From January, Labor will slash employer incentives for apprentices from $5,000 to $4,000 per apprentice. That's a thousand dollars less support for every small business that is doing the right thing by training the next generation, giving young Australians a start and keeping our economy moving. Without skilled workers we can't build homes, we can't keep the lights on and we can't maintain the roads, the hospitals or the infrastructure that makes our country work. Yet, at the very moment when Australia's skills pipeline is on life support, the Albanese Labor government has decided to pull the plug.

It may not sound like much to those sitting on the other side of the chamber, but, to a small-business owner trying to keep the doors open, every single dollar counts. At a time when almost 15,000 businesses have gone broke under Labor's watch in the last year alone, this decision is not just short-sighted; it's reckless. When the coalition was in government, the apprentice system was strong. We saw record highs of over 428,000 Australians in training, confidence was high, businesses were hiring, and apprentices were coming through the system in record numbers. But today, under Labor, there are 107,000 fewer apprentices training in the system. That is 107,000 fewer young Australians learning a trade. That's not just a statistic; that's tens of thousands of careers that'll never be started and small businesses that will never grow.

The reality is that wages are going up and the costs of business are going up, especially energy costs. Compliance is getting harder, red tape is getting thicker and small-business owners are being pushed to the limit. The only thing going down under Labor is the support for employers who take on the apprentices. It's madness. Labor decision shows a government completely out of touch with the reality facing businesses and tradies on the ground today. Their ideological opposition to backing employers is driving our skills system into the ground and threatening the next generation of tradespeople.

Labor is talking a big game about solving the housing crisis, but you can't build more homes without more tradies. If you can't train more tradies without employers, who can afford to take them on? Cutting support for them now is the wrong time. That's why I, along with industry leaders and peak bodies across the country, are calling on the Albanese government to urgently reinstate and strengthen employer incentives, before the 1 January deadline, to restore confidence and to protect Australia's future workforce. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Without them, apprentices will collapse. I'd asked the minister to reconsider on behalf of the sector.