Page 4800 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (5.07): The Greens will be supporting this bill. I must admit, given that it is the end of the year, I seriously looked at our supporting the adjournment motion, but we have not.
Mr Wall: On balance.
MS LE COUTEUR: On balance; I am not sure if it was a good call but we all make mistakes, members, as you will appreciate. Over the past three years I have been regularly contacted by people who have been facing serious financial and personal stress through owning an apartment in a defective building. Defects I have been told about range from structural problems to waterproofing failures, flammable cladding and apartments that are unliveable due to very loud cracking and popping noises when the building heats up and cools down.
The impact on the people affected can be substantial. A substantial number of owners of fairly new apartments in this city are forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars for repair works for their defective buildings. A small subset of these apartment owners end up with almost unsaleable units because the problems are so severe and the builder is so obstructionist that the defects will never be fixed. This is deeply unfair.
I think that we all absolutely recognise that and it is part of what Mr Parton’s speech was about. This is deeply unfair. I think there is community consensus that we need to fix this problem. When people buy a new home they have no way of knowing how well it is built. They have to trust that the regulatory system will make sure that it is free from major defects. Unfortunately, very often over the past 20 years they have been let down by that system.
This has not been just a Canberra issue. It is a bigger national issue around how governments regulate industries. Starting in the 1990s, there was a broad push around the country for economists and business lobbyists, backed by both the Liberals and the ALP, for deregulation, self-regulation and so-called light-hand regulation. But this approach has failed. The Greens and many like-minded people said during the 1990s that it would fail. Many average Australians thought it would fail.
Twenty-five years later, it has conclusively failed and the building industry is perhaps our worst example. As New South Wales Liberal Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, said in July this year, “We allowed the industry to self-regulate and it hasn’t worked.” Across Australia, we are left with the legacy of probably tens of billions of dollars of building defects to fix. For example, the Victorian government is currently spending $600 million on just one building’s defect issue, flammable cladding. This is in just one state.
Here in the ACT, the approach has been softly, softly until recently. The spiel from officials has always been about working cooperatively with builders to solve the problems. It has been a continuation of the light-handed regulation approach which has spectacularly failed over the previous two decades.
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