Page 867 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2018
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Minister Ramsay has previously outlined the work that Access Canberra has undertaken on improving compliance and resolving problems. Work currently underway for completion this year is: to develop guidelines for minimum design documentation for building approval applications; a code of practice for builders covering supervision and critical hold points during construction; a code of practice and regulation for building certifiers covering, amongst other things, stage inspection requirements; a risk-based auditing and inspection system for regulated building certification and building work; and an online course on the ACT building regulatory system.
We will also expand licence exams to all building classifications and to licence renewals. We will introduce a pre-application assessment for building surveyors, licensed applicants and for licensees who have transferred from other jurisdictions. This will include completion of the online training course. We will undertake further consultation on regulation of people designing and preparing building approval plans, developers contracting for residential projects and builder licence categories. This work covers an additional 15 items in the program. There will be a lot of consultation with industry and the community on the changes as well.
In the motion the program is characterised as 43 separate proposals. That is not quite the case, and I will explain why. They are 43 integrated reform actions. They are carefully thought through and they are designed to work together with each other and within the regulatory system. As an example, minimum documentation requirements set a benchmark for designers to meet. They also establish the baseline for certifiers to assess an application against and for auditors to review approvals and design work.
This documentation is also what a builder can expect to be provided and the owner can use to determine what was approved for construction, to resolve any disputes. So it is also integrated with codes of practice, which will be covered in new training, and which will be required to hold a licence. Once a person has a licence, action could be taken against them if they do not comply with the documentation requirements.
Each of the reforms has been considered in this way. Therefore the reforms are not just a matter of ticking things off one by one, separately; they have to be carefully linked and the work is very detailed, specialised and complex. So we have taken extra time to make sure that everything will work as a system.
There are other reasons why we have taken some extra time with the reforms. We are not alone in dealing with problems with poor building work or unfair payment and contracting practices. There are reforms that relate to security of payments, insolvencies and dispute resolution in our program. These include reviewing the findings of the Australian parliament’s Senate Economics References Committee on insolvency in the Australian construction industry, the ACT’s security of payments system, and results of trials of project payment models in other jurisdictions.
In December 2016, in response to the insolvency inquiry, the Australian government announced its own review of security of payment systems operating across Australia. The terms of reference for this review included to review state and territory security
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