A leading academic and an expert lawyer have been appointed to examine compliance and enforcement issues in Australia’s construction sector to help ensure the ongoing safety of the nation’s buildings.
The Building Ministers’ Forum (BMF) this week announced that Professor Peter Shergold and Bronwyn Weir have been commissioned to assess compliance and enforcement problems within the building and construction systems across the country, especially issues affecting implementation of the National Construction Code (NCC).
Assistant Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Craig Laundy, who chairs the BMF, said the government was committed to ensuring that Australia continued to have a safe built environment.
“Australia’s National Construction Code is among the best in the world,” Laundy said. “But we’ve got to work with state and territory regulators across the country to focus on stamping out the non-compliant installation of building products, such as combustible cladding on high-rise buildings.”
Laundy said the two experts commissioned to examine these issues had exemplary credentials.
Professor Shergold, the current Chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, led an independent review of government processes for the development and implementation of large public programes and projects in 2014.
Weir, a partner at Maddocks law firm, is one of the leading expert lawyers in building and construction, with a profound knowledge of building control systems.
“We want to make sure our builders not only have the right products to do their job, but are also using the right products for the job, to ensure we can provide continued confidence in Australia’s buildings,” Laundy said.
The Grenfell Tower fire and Lacrosse cladding disaster have exposed the serious problem of non-conforming products (NCP) in the Australian market.
Employer body, the Ai Group, blames non-conforming products on a lack of independent verification and visible regulatory authority. Ai Group CEO, Innes Willox, said Australia's regulatory system has not kept pace with the emergence of complex global supply chains.
“As a result, unscrupulous operators have taken advantage of weaknesses in the conformance framework by supplying these products into our markets,” he said. “To date, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.”
The AI Group undertook a survey of members to find out how extensive the problem is and if there is a solution.
“We found that 92 per cent of 222 respondent companies reported non-conforming product in their market,” Willox said.
“We found gaps and weaknesses in the building and construction conformance that included inadequacies with surveillance, audit checks, testing, first party certification and enforcement.”