Statement by Andy Graham, Civil Contractors Federation WA Chief Executive Officer

Today’s release of the National Skills Commission’s 2022 Skills Priority List confirms widespread shortages in civil construction trades and again highlights the Federal Government’s failure to adequately respond through its training and migration policies.

The 2022 Skills Priority List shows that skilled operators of excavators, loaders, paving machines and other civil construction equipment are in shortage, both in Western Australia and nationally.

Yet in the face of these shortages, the Federal Government persists with training and migration policies that discriminate against civil construction trade level workers, on the basis of an archaic skills classification system.

According to the Federal Government’s outdated ANZSCO system, the workers who build our infrastructure – roads, railways, bridges and pipelines – are semi-skilled, while the workers who our homes are skilled.

The ANZSCO classifications reflect a bygone era, when civil construction work was largely regarded as labouring, and formal training pathways were still being established. 

We’ve come a long way since then, and nowadays skilled civil construction trades such as plant operations, road construction and pipelaying are recognised as construction apprenticeships in most states, on an equal footing with the building trades.

The Federal Government’s reliance on ANZSCO when making skills policy decisions has two damaging effects.

First, it means civil construction apprentices receive no support from the Federal Government’s Australian Apprenticeships Incentives System (AAIS). Signwriters, locksmiths, gardeners, painters, bricklayers, plasterers and tilers can receive full AAIS funding, but civil construction apprentices cannot.

Secondly, it means our industry is denied access to temporary and permanent skilled migration pathways available to other sectors.

So we can’t bring in skilled tradespeople from overseas, and we can’t get funding support to train locals.

CCF has been advocating for an overhaul of ANZSCO for more than 10 years. We’ve had enough of writing submissions and endless reviews. It’s time for action, now. It’s time to stop discriminating against the skilled workers who construct our essential infrastructure.