A rugby league challenge, a Western Sydney school tour, funded white cards and a research paper with real numbers in it. There is more here than the average awareness campaign, and some of it lands directly on site.

Most workforce campaigns arrive as a media release and a hashtag. This one arrived with a school tour, a stack of funded white cards and a research paper that puts numbers on exactly how short the industry is.

James Hardie launched The Trade Off on 3 August, a campaign built in collaboration with the Parramatta Eels and aimed squarely at getting more young Australians to look seriously at carpentry.

The format is deliberately unsubtle. Hosted by Scott Cam, The Trade Off pits a team of three past and present Eels players against a James Hardie backed team of trade professionals and apprentices in a carpentry challenge.

The casting is the more interesting part. The Eels team includes Andrew Davey, a qualified carpenter and former NRL player, alongside Araz Nanva and Arthur Miller-Stephen, who are both currently working through carpentry apprenticeships. That is not celebrity endorsement. That is three people who have actually done the training, on camera, in front of an audience of teenagers who already follow the club.

Eels player J’Maine Hopgood, who completed his carpentry qualifications while playing NRL, put the case plainly.

“As grateful as I am for my NRL career, it’s important to remember that footy doesn’t last forever. I love working with my hands and wanted to pick up some skills that would let me do that.”

“I hope that more kids will be inspired by this to take up a trade,” Hopgood said.

The part that costs money

Awareness campaigns are cheap. This one has a line item attached.

Alongside the video content, James Hardie is running a speaking tour through Western Sydney schools, with question and answer sessions featuring Eels players and career case studies. At every school it visits, the company is funding white cards for 20 students.

That detail is worth pausing on. The white card is the compulsory worksite credential, and for a school leaver weighing up options it is a small but real cost at exactly the wrong moment. Funding it does not create a carpenter. It removes one reason not to turn up.

John Arneil, APAC President at James Hardie, framed the commitment as an industry obligation rather than a marketing exercise.

“Australia has very ambitious targets to build more houses. Increasing the number of tradespeople we have available will be critical to helping the industry meet demand. As an industry leader, we recognise we need to be part of the solution,” Arneil said.

“There will need to be a concerted effort across industry, education and government to address the labour shortage in a meaningful way. We are proud to be providing opportunities for members of our local communities in Western Sydney to not only enter construction trades, but also understand the value that these careers can add to their lives.”

The numbers underneath the campaign

The campaign launched alongside a whitepaper, Rebuilding Capacity, which is where the argument gets specific.

Construction employs roughly 9 per cent of the national workforce, about 1,371,500 people. The number working in core residential construction trades, however, sits at 277,827. On the paper’s assessment, that workforce can deliver about 184,000 homes a year.

The National Housing Accord target needs more than 274,000 homes a year. That leaves the residential trade base running roughly 30 per cent short of what the target asks of it.

None of that will surprise anyone tracking Australia’s construction labour market, but the framing is sharper than most. The paper also cites ABS data showing that as of February 2026, 16.9 per cent of the construction workforce was aged 55 or older, up from 14.8 per cent in 2014.

And the pipeline replacing them is narrower than the headline figures suggest. Of the roughly 100,000 construction apprentices and trainees who started last year, the paper notes that just 21,000 were in one of the key trades required for home building.

James Hardie puts the requirement at an additional 116,000 housing construction workers by 2030. The underlying modelling from BuildSkills Australia lands in the same territory, projecting 116,700 additional workers beyond business as usual supply to hit the Accord target.

Why the apprenticeship maths is hard for builders

The paper is unusually direct about the employer side of the problem, which is the part builders will recognise straight away.

Figures from GAN Australia, cited in the whitepaper, put it at 1.6 to 2.6 years before a four year apprenticeship becomes financially beneficial to the business carrying it. For a small builder running tight margins, that is a long runway on a bet that may walk out the door.

It gets harder with mature aged entrants. The apprenticeship system treats anyone over 21 as mature aged, which means an adult wage and, on the paper’s numbers, up to a 40 per cent increase in hourly cost. With limited targeted support attached, older candidates are frequently passed over for cheaper ones. That is a structural problem rather than a hiring preference, and naming it is more useful than pretending builders are simply choosing not to train people.

Retention is the other half. NCVER’s 2025 Apprentice and Trainee Outcomes Report found 27.7 per cent of trade non completers pointed to dissatisfaction with pay, working conditions or the workplace as the main reason they did not finish. NCVER also recorded a 4.2 per cent fall in construction apprenticeship contract commencements over the 12 months to March 2025. The completion rate, not the commencement rate is where the system keeps leaking, and it is the harder number to move.

The Housing Industry Association has been making a version of this point for some time. Its Future Workforce lead has argued that a reasonable retention rate has to be established and held if the industry is going to plan for the national pipeline of work across the next decade. The HIA position is that incentives need to help more builders bring apprentices on, bridge the mature age wage gap, and target recent school leavers directly.

The second lever: building more with the workforce you have

Where the paper gets genuinely useful is the argument that the labour gap is not only a recruitment problem. It reframes the shortage as partly a question of how homes are built, not only who builds them.

The example it leans on is autoclaved aerated concrete. Swapping brick for an AAC panel system does two things at once. It reduces the number of trade touchpoints on a job, and it opens a different labour pool, because installers can be trained through short introductory courses and supervised site experience rather than a full apprenticeship.

That is not a replacement for qualified trades, and the paper does not claim it is. It is a way of getting productive contribution out of new entrants sooner while they continue working toward broader qualifications.

Henley Properties Group is one of the volume builders already leaning on this. Chief Executive Antony Blackshaw put the operational case in the paper.

“The consistency of the system supports build efficiency, improves predictability on site and helps us maximise the productivity of available trade resources.”

Henley’s stated reason for moving is blunt and familiar: integrating AAC instead of brick has reduced its reliance on a shrinking pool of ageing bricklayers, which is what allows it to keep delivering at volume.

The independent modelling backs the direction. BuildSkills Australia has calculated that a 5 per cent productivity lift through modern methods of construction and comparable innovation would deliver roughly the same result as finding 30,000 extra workers. That is a substantial share of the gap, achieved without recruiting a single person.

The offsite picture is moving in step. The paper puts modern methods of construction at roughly 15 per cent of the Australian construction market, with federal investment of $49.3 million to grow prefabricated and modular home construction and a further $4.7 million to develop a voluntary national certification process for offsite work. Growth in these methods is forecast at around 8 per cent a year through to 2029, against 3 to 4 per cent for the wider industry.

What builders can take from this

Four things stand out as practical rather than promotional.

• The white card offer is real and geographically specific. Builders in Western Sydney should expect a cohort of school leavers arriving with the credential already in hand and some exposure to the industry behind it.
• Product specific training pathways widen the labour pool without a four year wait. AAC installation is the worked example, but the principle applies anywhere a system reduces the number of qualified trades a job depends on.
• The mature aged wage gap is now a named policy conversation rather than a quiet frustration. Builders who have passed on good older candidates for cost reasons are not outliers, and the industry bodies are pushing for support to close it.
• Productivity is being treated as a labour strategy. If a system decision removes a trade dependency from a build, that is workforce capacity, not just a margin improvement.

The obvious caveat is that none of this works without the training capacity to absorb new entrants. Getting a teenager interested in carpentry is the easy end. Getting them into a classroom, on time, with a qualified teacher in front of them, is where the system has been struggling. James Hardie’s TAFE NSW work sits on that side of the ledger too, with the company supplying fibre cement products, power tools, PPE and consumables to campuses and making training materials and technical expertise available to roughly 300 carpentry educators.

The bit that matters

For once, the response to the trade shortage is not another round of commentary about how bad it is.

A manufacturer has pointed its sponsorship money, its product, its training resources and its research at the same problem at the same time, and has done it in a specific postcode with a specific trade in mind. That is a narrower and more testable proposition than most national skills campaigns manage.

Whether The Trade Off converts teenagers into carpenters is a question only the next few years can answer. Campaigns are easy to launch and hard to measure. But the model is worth watching, because it treats the shortage as something the industry can act on rather than something it has to absorb.

After a decade of being told the labour gap is structural, permanent and somebody else’s to fix, that is a better starting position than the one the industry has been working from.

Find out more about James Hardie’s Rebuilding Capacity White Paper  and White Paper

Frequently asked questions

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE

The instinct with manufacturer campaigns is to discount them, and often that instinct is right. This one earns more attention than most, because the spend is attached to things that exist: funded credentials, product in TAFE workshops, educators trained, and a whitepaper willing to put an uncomfortable number on how far short the trade base is. The honest question is not whether James Hardie benefits. Of course it does. The question is whether the industry is better off with more manufacturers behaving this way. On the evidence here, it is.

Building a workforce is the conversation that keeps coming up on The Good Builder Podcast, from succession planning to apprentice retention. Subscribe wherever you listen, and get in touch if your business is trying something that is working.

This article is general in nature and based on publicly available information at the time of writing, including James Hardie’s Rebuilding Capacity whitepaper and accompanying media release. It does not constitute business, financial or employment advice. Builders should make their own assessments and seek professional guidance where relevant.

Last updated: 3 August 2026

Author: TGB Editorial