Page 1904 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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Madam Assistant Speaker, another new aspect of the building legislation introduced by the bill is to include powers to provide for standard conditions, prohibiting conditions and information that must be provided with the contract for certain contracts involving residential building work.
Other than sections 25 and 88, the Building Act does not prescribe the contents of contracts for building work or for the sale of incomplete buildings. Recent consultation canvassed the possibility of including standard contract provisions, creating standard definitions of some common terms, excluding agency agreements in certain residential building work contracts, and requiring information on parties’ rights, obligations and statutory protections to accompany a contract for residential building work.
Consultation found that many stakeholders felt that there would be benefit in improving consistency in residential building work contracts and to providing people entering into these contracts with better information on their rights and obligations. The bill will allow regulations to be enacted on these matters. No regulations are proposed at this time as it is the government’s intention to consult further on specific reforms.
To enable reforms relating to creating new guidelines and codes of practice for building documentation and certification, the bill expands the existing power to make a code of practice for building work to include building certification, and includes a new capacity for guidelines to be made for documents, plans and specifications such as those that must be part of a building approval application. Guidelines will provide clear minimum standards for people preparing building approval documentation, applicants, landowners, builders, certifiers, inspectors and auditors.
Madam Assistant Speaker, this bill also includes provisions in relation to appointments of building inspectors and what a building inspector may do during an inspection. These provisions are consistent with those for inspectors in the Construction Occupations (Licensing) Act and its other operational acts. Other changes will help users of the act better understand the functions of a building certifier in relation to building work they are appointed for and the obligation of both certifiers and builders in relation to stage inspections.
The proposed amendments to construction licensing laws include changes to grounds on which the Construction Occupations Registrar can refuse a new licence or renewal application if necessary or desirable to protect the public. These changes build on those enacted in 2013-14 and allow the registrar to consider the compliance history of directors, partners and nominees in relation to other licences they have been involved with rather than only those that they or the applicant have personally held.
The ACAT may also consider conditioning, suspending or cancelling a related licence if it is appropriate to do so. This is intended to help prevent people with poor compliance history or outstanding rectification and court orders from being able to obtain multiple licences, shift their operations across licences without being affected by the sanctions, or phoenix under a new licence.
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