We’re constantly finger-wagged by elites that we ‘need’ mass immigration to make up for a chronic skills shortage. The skills shortage is real, but the need for mass immigration isn’t. Because there’s an obvious solution that’s better for everybody – well, everybody but lazy grifter elites, anyway.
Train locals to do the skilled jobs that need filling.
But that takes time, effort and money. Our greedy, feckless politicians and big business would rather just keep flooding the country with supposedly ‘skilled’ Indians and Chinese, especially when the politicians will pay the bosses a subsidy to do so.
The debacle isn’t helped any by the elites’ obsession with universities.
Throughout school, Isabella loved physics, metalwork and woodwork, and even built her own electric guitar […]
Despite this, when it came to deciding on her future, pathways to “hands-on careers” didn’t appear to be on the table.
Frankly, given her ‘boy’ interests, it’s a wonder the school’s gender whisperers didn’t try to convince her to ‘transition’. But, I digress. The school administration is so university obsessed that their students can’t even graduate unless they’ve applied to university.
“I was told I had to apply for uni; literally, they would make sure we applied, otherwise they were like, ‘We can’t let you graduate.’
“The stigma that parents put on kids, and schools put on kids, that they have to go to uni to be successful, it’s so not true.”
To keep everyone happy, Isabella did apply for university, but she knew she would never go.
Instead, she started an electrical apprenticeship.
If kids like Isabella are so keen on a trade, why are we chronically short of tradies, then? And is a university education in 2025 worth what it’s cracked up to be?
Opposition education spokesman Jonno Duniam says the rankings slide for Australian universities shows “the ineffectiveness of the Albanese government’s higher education policies” and that it was a “sobering message to the government”.
In the latest QS university rankings published on Thursday morning, the University of Melbourne fell from 13th to 19th place, UNSW from 20th to 21st, and the University of Sydney down to 25th.
The decline in the value of a university education is, ironically, highlighted by the ABC’s university-educated journalists themselves.
According to Monash University’s 2024 Australian Youth Barometer report, 70 per cent of young people aged 15 to 19 say they plan to go to university after school.
For apprenticeships, the numbers are far lower, with only 15.2 per cent of males, 9.2 per cent of gender-diverse young people, and 4.1 per cent of females planning to do an apprenticeship.
Clearly, the problem is that there aren’t enough trannies on the nation’s building sites.
The attitudes of today’s youngsters doesn’t seem to be helping.
The apprenticeship “earning while learning” model has always been a selling point, however, apprenticeship wages aren’t particularly high, and some say this is contributing to the tradie shortage.
“The wages are a bit challenging sometimes when you’ve got car insurance to pay for and rego or your car’s broken down,” Josef says.
Well, cry us a river. Generations of tradies with less entitlement expectations managed just fine for the four years it takes to do an apprenticeship. And an apprentice’s wages are surely better than the dole or working part-time through uni.
Will Frogley, CEO of Master Builders South Australia [says… ] “You can earn more money today doing something else.
“But my message is if you stick with it, once you finish your apprenticeship within a few years you can be earning really good money and that’s why it’s really rewarding to stay the course.”
If you can get Zoomers to stay the course, of course.
The tradie shortage doesn’t start and end with money, though. Some in the industry say there are cultural challenges that contribute to the fact that almost half of apprentices don’t finish their training […]
“There’s a mindset from some of the old guard in the industry that kids lack resilience these days, they don’t know how to work, they’re much more high maintenance than they used to be,” Mr Frogley says.
Is that mindset wrong? Do they need to bring blankies and colouring books on-site?
Meanwhile, our university-educated ABC types have an even bigger worry.
Fewer than three per cent of people on the tools in Australia’s building and construction workforce are women.
Now do nursing and teaching.
