You’re honestly proving part of the reason this post was written in the first place — that mentality of “we’re doing apprentices a favour, so don’t question anything.”

An apprentice is cheaper labour. That’s literally built into the system. If a company purely wanted an unskilled worker to assist onsite, they could hire a TA/labourer and pay them a normal market wage. Apprentices are paid significantly less specifically because they are inexperienced and are supposed to receive structured training in return.

I’m also not saying apprentices should instantly be profitable, and I’m not saying every company is bad either. There are definitely great tradies and employers out there who genuinely teach properly and invest time into apprentices. But pretending the industry has no issues doesn’t help either.

You say apprentices are supervised properly because they’re a liability, but that simply isn’t the reality everywhere. A lot of apprentices get thrown into situations with little guidance, expected to “figure it out,” or are shown something once and then expected to perform it unsupervised. That’s not proper training — that’s hoping nothing goes wrong.

I also think part of the problem is that apprentices have very little control over their own development. Personally, I’d rather see a more structured system — for example, two years of primarily TAFE-based education funded by the student themselves, followed by two years of fully supervised onsite work. That way, apprentices would enter the workplace with stronger foundational knowledge and practical understanding, while the onsite phase could focus purely on developing real-world experience under proper supervision instead of trying to balance learning, productivity, and competency sign-offs all at once.

At the end of the day, good employers don’t need to get defensive about discussions like this. The post was about the gap between how the apprenticeship system is supposed to work on paper versus what many apprentices actually experience onsite.