It’s great to see another event coming together within Queensland, this being the new vamped up National Tradesman Expo.

It’s great to see a slow but continual increase in women taking up the grit and grime of labouring in commercial and non-commercial building industry.

This show emphasizing on just that, encouraging more women to take up trade work, no matter of how refined or not they are.

This is a good way for promotion in traineeships and trade apprentices for young ladies or women to gain new skills within the work force, without even having picked up a gas celled nail gun before.

Besides the latest tools and gadgets needed for the job, this is also about ladies and obviously on that note there will be just that, some nice promotional ladies, that we are all use to at numerous events.

As seen in the paper our Minister for Women Karen Struthers has done her work, commenting on how well the expo will be, including some extra wishes the girls be in their Sunday best rather than doing what promotional girls do best (promote).

Promotions not about being proper all the time, it’s about gaining interest, being noticed and of cause getting people in the door.

Speculating and nit-picking like your mothers-mother, on posters that serve the purpose above mentioned doesn’t help in anyway, nor does it encourage women, when using sexist slur comments that may impede on such promotion.

Images are images; chicks like good images that are tasteful and generally have no problem looking at their own gender more than the opposite.

All I can say Karen as an MP for Women, promotion of business is an area you know well and your comments are just that, a comment nothing more.

Good luck to the organisers on a successful show and we’ll all hope that some impression is made to spark further interest for women working or not.

Brett J Hutton

I had to redo the course for my White Card recently, because sometimes I work on construction sites. There were about 5 women in a total of 20; I wasn't surprised at the presence of other women, since many now work in construction and mining, more so at the number of backpackers and new immigrants / temporary workers (all male), and as a result the course was clearly designed as much as an introduction to Australian work culture as to OHS.

I was also amused to discover that you can now buy coloured steel-capped boots, the result of more women working in the area, according to the shop-assistant. So I turned up on the project in my new purple steel-caps, matching purple socks and T-shirt, tastefully contrasting with my lovely yellow highvis and hard hat.

One thing that has changed for the better is the acceptance of women in these situations as normal, rather than as weird or a problem (what about the toilets?). I've had toilets specially built for me on two occasions over the years ("the men are embarrassed about women using the toilet block") but that's another story.