There are some big, awful, worrying things going on in the world today, and others that range from confusing to annoying, and on to downright outrageous. Do I need to list them? 

No, I didn’t think so.

But despite all the big, awful, worrying things, life still goes on. Bills have to be paid. Kids have to be fed, sent back to school, taken to sport on Saturday, and told to “Get off the computer RIGHT THIS MINUTE or you can forget about the sleepover at Tiffany’s, young lady, and the phone will be taken away until you turn 46, or clean your bedroom, or whichever comes soonest, and I’m SERIOUS THIS TIME”. Or words to that effect.

Anyway, so the daily ebb and flow of living in Oz continues, despite Donald Trump putting half the world on notice he’s not happy with them and, by the way, he’s got a big army, and an even bigger navy, and lots of planes with bombs and things, and an itchy finger just before bedtime. It’s also despite Malcolm Turnbull delivering a speech this week that we last heard in 1968, and the NSW Government finally recognising that, “Oopsie, that whole local council amalgamation experiment/draconian takeover didn’t quite turn out the way we thought it would. Our bad.”

So, despite all of the above and so much more, most of us still manage to get the right-coloured garbage bins out each week.

But what we can’t do – or at least what I haven’t been able to do – is get a plumber.

It’s not life-threatening, it’s not a catastrophic risk to the world, it’s not the source of inter-generational hardship so that my great great great grandchildren will be paying for my sins many decades from now, but it is on the list of Things I Really Wish I Could Get Sorted Out Because They Shouldn’t Be This Much of a Fuss.

It started a few months ago when the downstairs toilet decided it wasn’t going to flush as effectively as it used to. Nothing major, but just enough of a difference to make me think it was probably just a little thing that a plumber could fix in one minute. But it was such a little thing I didn’t contact anyone.

Then the downpipe to one of the water tanks came unstuck in a heavy storm and I thought about renewing the lot. But it still wasn’t quite enough to get a plumber in. When the bigger water tank stopped collecting water because – I think – the piping higher up is clogged, or blocked (I’m not a plumber, how would I know?), I decided there was enough to make a call to a plumber and not be annoying.

Which is when the suburban tragedy of trying to find a plumber started.

Now I don’t want any plumbers out there to think I’m anti-plumber, or plumber-ist. Perish the thought. Plumbers are great. I love plumbers. They’re invariably cheery, even after digging a trench through clay in the stinking heat or clearing a pipe of things the rest of us turn green and pass out over. Go plumbers, I say.

No. The problem is getting one to your house. To cut a very long story short, the plumbers I’ve tried have been too big to do domestic stuff; too small to do roof stuff; too busy to take on any more work; too old to climb a ladder to fix the downpipes; too committed to jobs in Sydney/Canberra/Perth to do a job two streets from their house; too close to retirement to take on another job, however small; too crook with a sore back after their last job; too tired to work because their new baby won’t sleep, and other reasons I can’t quite remember now because it’s all a blur.

I did get one plumber to come out. He replaced an old shower head, fixed the downstairs toilet flush (and it was a one-minute job), said don’t worry about paying yet because he’d give me a bill when he came back to finish the bigger jobs. And that was the last I saw of him, despite calls.

A week ago something called the Tradie Price Index was released, showing that plumbers are the highest paid tradies, with an average hourly rate of $78.84. My son the carpenter was a bit miffed, but when I suggested he become a plumber to make my old age easier he let out a few expletives and wandered off into the sunset.

Another son, a qualified mechanic, said roughly the same.

The federal Department of Employment provides the brutal truth about plumbers in an “Occupational skills shortage information” notice on its website: “There is a general shortage of plumbers in NSW with one half of surveyed vacancies remaining unfilled.”

There were 870 plumbing apprenticeships completed in 2014 compared with an average of about 730 per year over the previous five years. The department expected the figure to return to about 730 per year.

I don’t think I’m alone in believing we’ve made a right old mess of getting people into trades and training programs over the past few years. To name just a few of the problems – the private colleges debacle; the gutting of TAFE and TAFE’s own goal in the form of a $530 million enrolment and computer system that failed to deliver. And that’s just in NSW. Public trust in vocational training in general has taken a beating.

The 2011 Federal Government’s Apprenticeships for the 21^st Century report found that Australian apprenticeship completion rates were “unacceptably low”, with a failure rate of nearly 50 per cent because of workplace or employer issues, lack of support and low wages. Employers also complained of lack of government support. Another federal apprenticeship report released in August repeated the need for significant reform, including greater support and clarity for employers and apprentices. It’s needed.