Page 4572 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 19 October 2010
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I note that the medium-term measures will be reviewed by December 2011 and the long-term measures by December 2012. The Greens and, I hope, the rest of the Assembly will continue to monitor progress on these and I look forward to hearing further information about these proposals. This information could be integrated into my proposed report back to the Assembly in August 2011.
Basically I would say we are very pleased with the progress to date but more needs to be done, particularly in the area of certification, and we really need a commitment to the implementation of the report and a preparedness to keep on with the work.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.28): I think Ms Le Couteur touched on this at the beginning of her speech when she said that there was some criticism that this process may have been a little too forgiving of ACTPLA. I think that was the very point that we were making when the Greens amended the original motion, which was to establish an inquiry. Simply giving it to the government to look into itself, simply handing over to government to tell us what it is going to do and to inquire into its own problems, is not the appropriate way to shed light on what are important issues.
We firmly believe that the quality of construction in the ACT in the main is of a high standard. We believe that we have a good industry in the ACT, that far more often than not they get it right, but we also know—and it has been drawn to our attention and to the community’s attention—that sometimes they do get it wrong and in some cases quite seriously so.
I do not think that anyone who has been through the process of having poor building standards would want us to underestimate the impact of that on a family. There were a number of Stateline pieces on this. There were at least two. In the second one we saw the impact on a family of some serious problems in building work. And that costs a lot of money. That costs families a lot of money and can cause families a lot of heartache. They are serious issues.
We do maintain that the building industry generally gets it right, and for that reason it is even more important that we are rigorous in this. Every time there is a cowboy, every time there are those one or two shoddy builders, they put the industry in a bad light, and unfairly so. They put in a bad light the hardworking men and women in the industry—the small businesspeople, the employees—who do so much to build the ACT and contribute so much to our economy, when we see those kinds of stories emerge. For that reason it is critically important that we do all we can to ensure that the community can have confidence.
We believe that the way to do that would be to have an inquiry. That is what we believed. Ms Le Couteur’s comments today, I think, really reinforce that there is a feeling that it has gone too easy on the government. It is going to go too easy on the government because it is the government’s process. It is not a genuine inquiry. It is not members of the Assembly on behalf of the community inquiring into this issue and shedding light on this issue. I think that would have been a better way of putting this behind us, of getting to the bottom, of finding which are the best reforms that are needed. Instead we have got a process that falls well short of that mark.
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