New apprenticeships are not evenly spread across Australia in proportion to the spread of the working-age population in each State and Territory. New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have proportionately fewer new apprentices than their population shares would suggest (table 6). However, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, along with Victoria, have experienced the highest rates of growth in the past year.

Rural and remote Australia is comparatively well served by the apprenticeship system as shown in table 7. People living in rural and remote areas account for 32% of all new apprentices yet the share of the working-age population in these areas is only 27%. People in metropolitan areas other than capital cities are also doing well. However, while some two-thirds of the working-age population live in capital cities, only 59% of new apprentices are in capital cities.

table 7: new apprentices in each geographic region of Australia, 2000
geographic region		new apprentices
	no. in training (’000)	proportion of total (%)	share of working age population (a) (%)
capital city	163.7	59.4	65.5
other metropolitan	21.5	7.8	7.5
rural	79.4	28.8	24.2
remote	7.9	2.9	2.8
interstate	2.5	0.9	0.0
region not stated	0.5	0.2	0.0
total	275.6	100.0	100.0
note: (a) population aged 15–64 years in June 1999. source: NCVER (2000c); data supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics