Page 1767 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 15 May 2019

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(iv) in the ACT, an application for building approval must be assessed against the code as adopted on date of approval, rather than the date the application was made, with no other transition provisions available;

(e) Minister for Building Quality Improvement approved a delay in adopting the recent National Construction Code amendments to 1 September 2019 after hearing from a number of individual licensees on the change;

(f) further talks conducted with industry representative groups over the weekend of 4 to 5 May which indicated many practitioners did not require further time to adjust for most of the changes;

(g) Minister then decided to adopt a majority of the changes on 1 June 2019;

(h) rollout of building reforms has been delayed and the Government is continuing to actively roll out its building regulation reforms as a matter of priority; and

(i) team within the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate responsible for this has been augmented since the beginning of 2019 to include an additional qualified building surveyor, a qualified structural engineer, as well as experts in policy development, regulation and design, raising the team from three FTE to eight FTE; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) ensure adequate consultation with industry on building regulation reforms;

(b) expedite implementation of outstanding elements of the National Construction Code update; and

The government takes building quality very seriously. That is why we have been strongly advocating in the building ministers forum for strong and progressive measures in the code, lifting the quality of buildings not just in the ACT but nationwide. The code is implemented in a number of different ways throughout the country. Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania all have provisions that allow a certifier to disapply the new version of the code in circumstances where substantial progress has been made on the design of the building before the new provisions are adopted.

Western Australia has a different way of doing the transition period: it provides for a transition of 12 months after the date the code is adopted. In New South Wales and South Australia there is a different way of working for that transition period: if an application for approval is made before the adoption date it can be assessed against the version of the code that is in force at the time of the application. The ACT, however, applies the code in force on the date of the building approval. That is why it was important to consider how we transition to the new provisions in the code.

Concerns were communicated to EPSDD, including at an ACT Fire & Rescue industry day on 9 April and at an NCC seminar held by the HIA on 17 April this year,

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