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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 12 Hansard (16 November) . . Page.. 3540 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Mr Speaker, The Building and Construction Industry Training Fund Board held its first meeting on Monday 15 November.

The Chair is Mr James Service, nominated by the Property Council of Australia. The two employer representatives are Mr Peter Smith and Dr Sandra Tweedie. The two employee representatives are Ms Sarah Schoonwater and Mr Brian O'Reilly.

The Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Act 1999 is due to commence on 21 November 1999.

Two bills are before the Assembly are for minor amendments to the Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Act 1999 and to the Building Act 1972. I now present the required amendments to the Training Act.

The purpose of these amendments is to make the payment and collection of the Building Training Levies as efficient as possible. Amendments to both Acts are necessary because the levy collection regime of the existing Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Act 1999 is completely out of kilter with the way other building fees and levies are applied in the ACT.

There is a simple historical reason for this.

The Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Act 1999, passed by the Assembly in May 1999, had been in development for a considerable period of time. I won't go into a detailed history here, but the Bill introduced in 1999 had been in gestation for a number of years. During this period significant changes were made to the way in which the building industry was regulated, including radical changes to the building approval and levy collection processes. These changes were not picked up in the Training Act.

We now recognise that, in its current form, the Training Act introduced an entirely inappropriate levy collection regime. It now runs counter to the way the Building Levy, and other building fees, are assessed and collected. It was turning the clock backwards.

The combined effect of the Building Act and the Training Act is to require any person undertaking building work to pay two different fees to two different bodies, calculated on two different bases.

This would be very disruptive and inefficient, and should obviously be avoided. Mr Speaker, the amendments to the Training Act before this Assembly are necessary to redress this situation.

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