Page 872 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2018
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What has caused this outbreak of construction problems over the past five to 10 years? My view is that part of it is the economic deregulation we went through several decades ago. It went too far in many areas. And the construction industry is one particularly serious example of what goes wrong with a light-hearted regulation approach. Decades on, the result is a decline in the skills level within the construction industry, a culture of taking shortcuts which means that people who want to do the right thing are priced out of the market and feel under constant pressure to reduce the quality of their product, and regulators that simply are not strong enough to keep the worst elements of the industry in check.
To return to Mr Parton’s motion, it is clear that major building regulatory system reforms will be one important step in resolving this problem. As Mr Parton’s motion notes, the government released a reform package in June 2016. Implementation of that package appears to be well behind time, which is a serious problem given the importance of this issue. Much of the package was due to be completed by the end of 2016 and with almost all of it to be done by 2017. Unfortunately, I do not believe even the 2016 ones are all done. It is hard to tell, though, because there has been no public reporting on this that I am aware of. I will return to this later and you will see that fixing this problem is a major thrust of the amendment which I have negotiated with the ALP.
I thank Mr Gentleman for his speech on this. I do agree that it is a complex problem and that some important work has already been done. For example, when I asked about progress on building reforms in estimates, I was told about the builders licence exams:
It has started in the area of a C-class licence holder. There has been a failure rate which exceeds 50 per cent to date.
That is a lot of potentially dodgy builders who will not be entering the system, which is good.
The government also included in the budget last year the implementation of a very important Greens-ALP parliamentary agreement item:
Establish a panel of independent auditors to conduct mandatory annual audits of building certifiers for the self-funding model.
This was an initiative the Greens took to the election based on feedback from stakeholders and the community.
While this limited progress is good, we need to move faster. These problems are having a huge impact on people’s lives and dodgy buildings that are started now, before the reforms are fully implemented, will still be impacting people many years down the track.
Given that I agree strongly with Mr Parton’s concerns about the delays in getting the reforms implemented, why am I going to vote for the ALP amendment rather than
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