Friday, 14 November 2025

 Will FOWLES (Ringwood) (17:23): (1415) My adjournment this evening is for the Minister for Planning, who I accept has had a busy week. The action I seek is that the minister investigate options to remove the inherent conflict of interest in the current private building surveyor system. Building surveyors should be accountable to the public, not to the developers who are paying their bills. Since municipal surveyors were taken off the table by the Kennett government back in the 1990s there has been a clear pattern of privately engaged building surveyors signing off on work that is simply not built to code. This conflict of interest has contributed to major systemic problems, including the cladding crisis, which cost this government a huge amount of time, energy and money and can almost certainly be drilled back to private building surveyors signing off on projects that simply were not built to code.

We are also seeing an absolute rash, an outbreak, of apartment buildings with leaking basements, particularly, other water ingress issues and a whole string of defects. It is a problem so substantial and so broad-based it is actually shaking confidence in the apartment and strata industry more generally.

That is a very, very big problem when we have a serious housing crisis to contend with. I know that every single metropolitan MP, particularly probably in this place, has constituents that have been affected by buildings that are failing. They are typically new buildings or near-new buildings, and they are failing because a surveyor, who is meant to act in the public interest, is financially tied to the very person that they are regulating. It is time to look seriously at reform. We need a model that restores independence, breaks the link between developers or owners and building surveyors and ensures compliance decisions are made properly.

Back in the 1990s I am sure there were enormous delays attached to municipal surveyors getting around to signing off on building projects. That was almost certainly the case, and I do not dispute that. What you have now is a whole range of private businesses, private surveyors, in the market undertaking this work, as they should, and that is fine. The nexus we need to break, though, is between the person being surveyed and the surveyor, because the surveyor is ultimately doing public work; it is an extension of the public good. They are there to enforce and ensure compliance against a series of regulations that are publicly derived, which in turn are delegated from legislation that is publicly derived. It is a public function, and for it to be paid for privately simply breaks down the process. So why not go, ‘Well, we’ve got privately funded building surveyors. Let’s let the councils use those privately funded building surveyors to do that work’ The developer still picks up the tab. That is absolutely fine. But why don’t we get councils to do the appointment so that appointment decision is taken out of the hands of the builder or the developer and, most importantly, the decision to fund that surveyor is also removed from them.