“It will take two years to fix …”
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- Published: Monday, 17 February 2020 12:55
NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler (above) admitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in an article published on 8 February that “a major fix to the state’s residential construction crisis is two years away, as fresh cracks emerged in Sydney’s troubled Mascot Towers apartment block”.
The Commissioner said, “he had been a ‘bit despondent’ after visiting some ‘pretty awful’ construction sites in recent weeks.
There are some really regrettable things out there that abhor me.”
And us too, Mr Building Commissioner. Nothing but a massive increase in your resources and funding and a commitment by the Government to make dodgy builders and developers responsible for their shoddy work and liable for damages will do. The owners and residents of Mascot Towers, Opal Tower and the other uninhabitable developments have been more than “a bit despondent” for a long time now.
But even the two years target identified by the Building Commissioner depends upon the Berejiklian government getting their building reform package through the NSW Upper House. It’s on pause while the Upper House presses the recommendations of the Shoebridge Committee as an alternative and more dynamic proposal. We prefer Shoebridge’s recommendations, too.
While we were all suffocating in the smoke or worse through January, the Minister for Better Regulation (sic), Kevin Anderson, announced on 21 January that he would “introduce a risk rating system for builders, certifiers and developers that would score them on the quality of their previous projects to weed out the dodgy operators”.
When it comes to certifiers, that has been the role of the Building Professionals Board, or whatever it’s called, or wherever it sits in government these days. Clearly the Minister has a lack of confidence in that organisation to have done what is now being required to be done with some kind of a rating system.
If you want to see a pretty good rating system, check out the penalties page on the BPB site. We’d be happy to help - the dodgy bastards with multiple penalties on the BPB site should never, ever work again in the industry, and should never, ever be able to run businesses employing others doing certification, or anything else to do with construction.
And while we’re at it, ratings, really? Let’s not forget that the Global Financial Crisis was all about dodgy investment strategies that had all been rated AAA by both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, respected and authoritative ratings businesses that really didn’t know what they were rating...
And speaking of people not paying attention...