Amid the growing "teacher quality" discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Starting with the Government response to "A Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession" (1998) and moving to the Government response to "Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers" (2015), it explores changing representations in the context of broader shifts in education policy related to teachers' work over this timeframe. It argues that the early career teacher "problem" is articulated in very different ways in these two timeframes, explores the antecedents of key tenets of the current policy settlement, and, using the theory of practice architectures, considers the implications of these for the preconditions that shape and frame teachers' work in contemporary times.