Queensland’s construction industry is short on workers and the gap is only going to get more uncomfortable. The state faces an average shortfall of 18,200 workers per year across the next eight years, peaking hard through 2027 and 2028.¹ Every conversation about finding solutions lands in the same place: more apprentices, more migration, more training programs. But what if part of the answer has been sitting right under the industry’s nose the whole time?
The Industry Is Looking for Workers in the Wrong Places
Ask most people in construction how to close the labour gap and you’ll hear the same answers. Train more apprentices. Bring in more migrants. Upskill faster. They’re not wrong, but they’re describing solutions that take years to land on a problem showing up on sites right now.
Infrastructure Australia puts the national shortage of trades workers and labourers at 126,000 by mid-2027.² That’s not a rounding error. It’s a structural shortfall that traditional pipelines alone won’t close, certainly not before Queensland’s major project pipeline and Olympic infrastructure program hit their peak simultaneously.
The most overlooked part of the answer might not be about creating new workers at all. It might be about reaching the ones who were always already there and rethinking how the work itself gets divided up on site.
The Industry’s Most Expensive Habit
Here’s something worth sitting with. A significant share of physical work on a typical construction site doesn’t require a trade qualification. Material handling, site clean-up, deliveries, preparation. These are tasks a capable person with a White Card can do legally from day one.
Labour productivity in Queensland’s construction sector is only 5 per cent higher than it was 30 years ago, while the broader economy grew by 65 per cent over the same period.³ Getting labour allocation right on site is one of the most practical levers the industry has, and a meaningful part of that gap comes down to whether the right people are doing the right work.
Right now, highly qualified tradespeople are regularly completing tasks that sit well below their skill level. It’s the professional equivalent of asking a doctor to spend a notable portion of their day filing paperwork instead of treating patients. It’s an expensive habit and it starts with asking who could actually be doing this work instead.
The Workers Were Always There. The System Wasn’t.
Think about who actually wants flexible, well-paying work with no fixed commitment. Students juggling a timetable that changes every semester. Career-changers between roles. Semi-retirees who want to stay active a few days a week without signing up for a full-time roster. Queensland alone has more than 300,000 students enrolled across its universities and TAFE campuses.⁴
When that’s coupled with the fact that the barrier to entry for general labouring is genuinely low, questioning why they aren’t already on sites becomes even more compelling. A White Card, the minimum requirement to step onto any construction site in Australia, takes less than a day and costs under $60 in Queensland.⁵ So the capability to have these workers on site was always there. What was missing was a system that actually made it possible.
In practice, anyone who wanted casual site work faced an impossible set of options: go through a labour hire middleman, take on an ABN arrangement that shifted the risk entirely onto them, or commit to a full-time role that didn’t fit their life. None of those options worked and construction kept chasing a workforce that was sitting just out of reach.
What the Businesses Getting This Right Already Know
If you’re running a construction business right now, you’ve felt how hard it is to keep sites moving, margins intact and projects on schedule. Labour is scarce, costs are climbing and Queensland is heading into one of the most demanding stretches of construction activity in the state’s history. The businesses coming out the other side will be those willing to rethink how they build their workforce.
That means getting labour allocation right. It means building a pool of casual workers who handle the non-trade work so your tradespeople stay focused on what only they can do. That’ll mean having a crew arriving late afternoon to clean up, take deliveries and move materials to where the trades will need them in the morning. So when your chippies and sparkies arrive, they do nothing but what you’re actually paying them to do.
With Queensland bracing for a packed run into 2032, the industry can’t afford to keep running at 5 per cent productivity growth while the broader economy has managed 65 per cent.³ The students and career-changers who want this work are already out there and now, for the first time, they are genuinely reachable. The workforce was never the problem. The system was. And now that the system has changed, the businesses that move first will be the ones that benefit most.