Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027

Ms LE (Fowler) (12:26): The government calls this the most ambitious and important budget in decades, but there is nothing ambitious about a budget that cuts the support we use to train the very workers we need to build this country. This budget confirms that, from January next year, the Key Apprenticeship Program incentive pay to employers will be cut from $5,000 to $4,000.

That is a 20 per cent cut, and it falls on the exact trades the government says matter most: clean energy and housing construction. We are in the middle of a housing crisis—if we don't already know it. The government has promised 1.2 million new homes by 2029, and they're already not meeting that number.

The government's decided to walk away from training apprentices and make it harder for employers to take one on. The peak body for the home building industry, the Housing Industry Association, said it plainly. It welcomed parts of the budget but warned that cutting this incentive risks discouraging employers from taking on apprentices, especially the firms already training young people at scale.

As the HIA put it, this budget is one hand giving while the other hand takes away. Builders and traders have told us for years that they cannot find enough skilled workers and, when they do, they struggle to keep them. Apprentices start but do not finish.

Projects are delayed because the people are not there. Cutting support now does not fix that; it makes it worse. This is not abstract in my electorate of Fowler.

On the last census, more than a third of employed people—over 21,000 workers—were in machinery operating, labouring and trades occupations. That is 37 per cent of our workforce against around 26 per cent across New South Wales and 28 per cent across Australia. Here is what makes this cut bite even harder in my community.

Far fewer of our young people go to university. For so many families in my electorate, a trade is not a backup plan; it is the plan. It is the pathway into secure work and a good life, so, when this government cuts apprenticeship support, it is pulling the ladder up on the very community that relies on it most.

I saw the hunger for myself last month after the Fowler Future Fest, our careers expo. The Housing Industry Association stall was one of the busiest, crowded with young people who want a trade. They want to earn while they learn and build a real career.

Those young people are exactly who this cut lets down. Let me make a broader point: apprenticeship support is not a handout. It is how a small or family business builds its own future by training the next generation in the skills it needs to grow.

When we back a small business to take on an apprentice, we are building skills and capability in our young people. That is not a cost to the country; it's an investment in it. This is not about construction only.

For example, take hospitality, an industry that turns over around $66 billion a year and employs close to a million Australians. It has the youngest workforce in the country. From January this year, the support for apprentices and trainees in hospitality was cut in half, from about $5,000 to a maximum of $2½ thousand.

So the cafe, the restaurant and the family kitchen that gives a young person their very first job now gets half the help to train them. In the middle of a skills shortage, how does that make any sense at all? There are no apprentices without an employer being willing and able to sign the training contract and to carry the risk.

Most employers in my community are small- and family businesses carrying every new cost and every new rule themselves. The budget makes the risk heavier, not lighter, at the very moment the pipeline is already fragile. The contradiction sits at the heart of this budget.

You cannot build 1.2 million homes without the workers to build them. As the Housing Industry Association puts it: Business as usual will not deliver the trades numbers Australia needs. Yet this budget cuts the one incentive designed to bring those workers in.

So my questions to the minister are these: how does cutting apprenticeship support help employers in communities like mine take on and keep apprentices; why would any government that says housing is top priority make it harder, not easier, to train people who will build the homes; and what will this government do to back the small- and family businesses who give our young people their start instead of giving them every reason to pull back?