Master Builders NT welcomes the Federal Government’s $5,000 Key Apprentice Program incentive for residential and electrical trades.  It recognises a hard truth: we are critically short of trades if Australia is serious about delivering more homes.

While residential housing and electrical trades rightly attract targeted support, commercial and civil construction have been left behind despite being essential to:

• enabling housing supply,
• delivering roads, utilities and community infrastructure, and
• supporting Defence.

You cannot build homes without the civil works that service them. You cannot grow cities without commercial construction.

We need to grow our workforce pipeline in the NT, by only backing a part of the industry while overlooking the rest isn’t future focused.

We need a whole-of-construction workforce strategy that supports apprentices across residential, commercial and civil sectors, because that’s how the industry actually operates.

Sallyann Innes, CEO Master Builders NT