Page 731 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 2010
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One concern I have about this bill and the construction industry as a whole, I guess, is the level of privatisation of building certification. Related to this is one issue which says that a works assessor is not to take on a job if they have an interest in the work, which we otherwise know as conflict of interest, in an independent assessment. Despite the very careful provisions in the bill to vet for legal and financial interests, I note that it is very difficult to completely avoid all conflicts of interest, particularly in a relatively small jurisdiction such as the ACT. One issue that has been raised around this is that, if you would like to be engaged again to do a works assessment for that same developer, it is of course in your interest to tick off all the boxes and sign off on the report.
There is also a huge hole in the building certification process, particularly for the larger unit titled apartments, as there does not seem to be a place for any of the existing inspectors, nor the process, to really vet the building products or standards, with the client being the eventual owner and resident of the unit titled buildings. As long as the construction is certified to comply with the building code, there does not seem to be much that can be done through the ACTPLA processes if the building does not match up to the plans which the owners signed up to. It is then left to the legal system.
Given the way unit titles work, the building certifiers will have been employed by the developer, not in fact by the eventual owners. And this is an item on which there has been considerable correspondence in the Canberra Times and other places. It does seem to be a frequent occurrence in the ACT that townhouses and apartments are built to a standard that does not meet the expectation of the owners and the tenants. And there seems to be an issue where we need to improve some basic standards, to ensure that certifiers sign off in a more rigorous fashion.
I quote from a letter which Murray Upton of the Owners Corporation Network recently sent to the Canberra Times:
It would appear that under the existing legislation it is difficult to determine (legally) just what a building certifier is supposed to certify and when defects are found they are too problematic (legally) for the certifier or ACTPLA to deal with. The duties and responsibilities of building certifiers should be increased and clearly defined in the legislation. Depending on the Building Codes of Australia is totally inadequate.
There was quite a discussion yesterday evening about insulation installation and the need for this to be properly certified, or certified or monitored, or something. There was a lot of agreement that something needed to be done and I think we all agreed that not certifying or not adequately training tradespeople or in fact even allowing do-it-yourselfers to do the job can lead to disastrous results. And the best results occur, obviously, when we have professionals who are well trained, motivated and monitored, and when the buying, consuming, public is both interested and informed about insulation. In fact, that was fairly much the case in Canberra prior to the Rudd and Garrett scheme.
But in circumstances where the public has limited knowledge and that limited ability to scrutinise the developments then auditing by the government is vital. And this is the situation with most building development. An auditing process is vital.
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