Tuesday, 31 March 2026

 David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (13:38): It is a pleasure to rise on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, and I say from the outset that the opposition will not be opposing this bill. The bill comes as the government winds down Cladding Safety Victoria, an established body that was formed in December of 2020 to deal with some of the issues around the widespread combustible cladding crisis following the Lacrosse and Grenfell Tower fires. Cladding Safety Victoria was created as a temporary body to deal with and coordinate the rectification of these unsafe buildings and to ensure that affected residents would have a vehicle to be able to take their issues to and that those buildings could be appropriately rectified. We were told in the bill briefing that we had that since Cladding Safety Victoria was established, over 80 per cent of the rectification processes have been done and that therefore Cladding Safety Victoria is no longer required. A lot of the functions of Cladding Safety Victoria will be folded into the BPC, or the Building and Plumbing Commission.

I thank the government for the briefing. But I do want to say at the outset that there were a number of questions that we put to the government in this briefing, so there are still details that are outstanding and questions that we still have. I would have appreciated having some of that information. I will go through that information as I go through this bill, because the devil is in the detail and we can only take the briefing at face value. Certainly our members who were present at that briefing had some really important questions on just how much we are talking about in terms of the dollars and what is left in terms of the fund that will be wound in to deal with the rectification processes for the 20 per cent that are left over and the money which goes from the cladding rectification fund into now an additional fund which is attached to the building permit scheme. The government suggests that will be less overall in terms of the cost imposed on builders. Again, we just want to understand some of the figures and numbers which we do not have information on but which we did ask for.

As I stated, the bill repeals the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020, abolishes Cladding Safety Victoria, transfers remaining functions and assets and liabilities to the Victorian Building Authority framework and a lot of the functions to the Building and Plumbing Commission. I will talk a little bit more about the Building and Plumbing Commission a little bit later. One of the things that I found really interesting when we heard the government business program being debated – when you debate a government business program, you talk about the bills that are before the Parliament – was that a number of members from the government stood on their feet and said this bill is about dealing with and cleaning up dodgy builders. Can I just pull the government up on this? I think it is really important for the government not to be using Parliament to attack the very builders that they are expecting to build the homes that they say are needed as part of the housing targets, because you do not build 80,000 homes a year or 800,000 homes without builders. If you want to ridicule the very builders that are doing that and call them dodgy as a lump sum, then I think that is highly inappropriate, particularly when you are talking about cladding, because this was not a builder problem, this was a materials problem.

In fact when this was first developed the builders went in good faith and said, ‘Great, we can use these materials.’ They were not using dodgy materials deliberately. They were using the cladding because it was a legitimate product that was authorised and approved and met all the regulations and had all the stamps to say they could use this material, only to find out after those fires that the material was not safe and was not viable and should not have been used. Well, that is on the government and their regulatory authority and the checks and balances and all the ticks of approval that consumers rely on. You cannot blame builders for it; you have got to blame the actual government and their regulations in terms of how it is being done. So the process has been shoddy at best – not from the builders’ perspective but from the actual regulatory environment, which this government manages. We will have another bill before the Parliament shortly, which will talk again about so-called consumer protection. But all the government will do again is talk about shoddy and dodgy builders; they will not talk about the red tape, the cost to builders and those costs being passed on to the industry and to mums and dads that want to build their first home. Why aren’t we getting houses built in Victoria? Because there is no confidence in the industry.

Katie Hall interjected.

David SOUTHWICK: There was an interjection from the member for Footscray, who said, ‘We are.’ We are 55,000 homes short on the two-year target, so the government is not building the targeted homes that were promised – 80,000 homes a year. In two years, we are 55,000 short on that target. That is nowhere near a big stamp or a tick of approval. That is a fail. The reason why we are not is because the cost of construction is too expensive. Too many builders are going to the wall. Yes, we need to clean up the industry – absolutely we do – but at the same time we have got to give confidence to people for them to be able to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to support the industry’; for builders to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to go out there and actually run a small business’; and for those young people that want to be tradies and work as builders, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians or plumbers to have confidence in that industry. That is what we have got to do – we have got to back the industry. But you cannot back the industry when you attack them, and that is what we are seeing from this government. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Back on cladding, the reason why we are not opposing this bill is because there was Cladding Safety Victoria, which was set up as a body to deal with the dodgy materials and the buildings that needed rectification, and as part of dealing with those dodgy materials and rectification there was a fund that was set up, and that fund was to be able to rectify them. As I said, 80 per cent of those have been taken care of. So the purpose of this bill is to wind up Cladding Safety Victoria. It is to transfer the residual functions and liabilities to the BPC and to repeal the cladding rectification levy and those works, replacing the funding through the revised building permit scheme and level structure.

It is important to understand that this bill will not affect smaller traditional homes, regional buildings and certain classes of buildings. It is for particular buildings, and it is particularly also for a number of government buildings – hospitals and the like. We were told in the briefing that the government said the apartment developments affected by the new levy adjustment would still see an overall reduction in the levy costs because the replacement amount would be much smaller than the cladding replacement levy; that is meant to be a saving of between 47 per cent and 67 per cent. I would like to see the numbers and I would like to see the details, but that is a claim made by the government – that overall there will be less cost to the industry. We are seeing everywhere else an increase in taxation and cost. We can only take the government on their word about this.

The questions that were raised that have not been answered and I put again to the house, and I hope the minister will respond accordingly, are: if the cladding program is truly complete – and they are saying it is 81 per cent at the moment or thereabouts – when will the remainder be complete? Are there still outstanding buildings or liabilities? Has enough money been collected to finish the work in the scope? How much money remains in the fund? And what happens to the remaining funds on the repeal? The government say they have got plenty of money left over to be able to deal with the 19 per cent or whatever it might be that is left. Well, how much money is left over? And once that has been done, what does the modelling suggest will be left, and where does it go? Does it go into consolidated revenue? Does it go back to the very builders that put in the money in the first place? Where does the money go? It would be very interesting to be able to understand all of that.

Just looking at some of the issues, one of the things that we need to understand, coming back to my earlier point, is that some of these builders, who have been working in good faith, run small businesses and are the backbone of our economy, our industry, jobs and houses, have been unfortunately targeted by the government and ridiculed in many cases – it has all been, I do not know, called dodgy. I think we have got to be careful, as I said, about that language. I want to give an example, and it may be the member for Brighton’s example that I am about to use, but certainly this was the feedback that we got from Master Builders Victoria, who suggested that small builders are being punished by the rules that the government has put in place. It is really interesting, because we have got Labor, who on one hand have given $15 billion away to the CFMEU, yet they expect builders who followed the government’s advice on what materials were safe to then have to pay to clean up the government’s mess, and retrospectively, even more importantly – so not as it happened but years later, thinking that they were doing the right thing, only to get a big fat bill years later and be told, ‘Well, actually, the materials that we told you were okay are not okay, and because you’ve used them under our advice but now we’re giving you different advice, you’re going to have to pay for them.’ How bad is that?

Let me give you the example. The government had a particular builder, and this particular builder had about a million dollars of product that was outstanding, and he retired. He finished his business and said, ‘Right, well, I’m done,’ after years of working in the industry. And then all of a sudden he got a bill for about a million dollars, 10 years later, which he had to find. With no insurance, no way of being able to find this back, he had had to somehow try and work out how he was going to deal with a cladding issue that was not his issue. He followed everything by the book and did what he thought was the right thing. They are ones that are not caught up in this legislation, but they are caught up in the process – a bad process that this government has allowed to happen. So what about them? How are we going to look after them? How is this poor person, who spent all their life employing people, working and contributing to the economy, now, in his retirement, going to find a million dollars? That is just completely unfair, and I would be very interested in the government providing some assurance on how we actually deal with this.

James Newbury interjected.

David SOUTHWICK: Zero. When we look at the overall industry and we look at what has been happening in terms of how significant this issue is, we have got over 1300 residential buildings, we have got 123,000-plus Victorians across 65,000 homes, we have got 409 high-risk buildings that have been completed and we have got 275,000 square metres of cladding removed. That is 13½ MCG fields worth. That is a lot of materials, a lot of dodgy stock. I would suggest that if we had things right in the first place, we would not have had to deal with all of this. You have got 130 government buildings that have been remediated. You have got 50,000-plus metres of cladding removed. You have got 1038 publicly used buildings that have been assessed – schools, hospitals and the like. You have got 80,000-plus private apartments that have been supported and 133 government buildings that have been made safer from the rectification process.

What does this all mean? Does this mean the government have finally found a problem, which was theirs, and set up an agency, done a review and had some people – and I want to acknowledge the former Premier Ted Baillieu, who has been very instrumental in working through some of the government’s issues on this and coming up with a really good path forward to try and help the industry. Former Premier Ted Baillieu has been instrumental in that. As a former architect, he knows a thing or two about buildings and architecture and design, and he has certainly been instrumental in setting a path forward. But it is very interesting because I think once you recognise the problem, you would then hope that things are sorted and we no longer have an issue. But an article just recently, from 1 March 2025 – when I say recently, just over a year ago – said ‘Victorian apartment buildings failing fire safety standards, new research reveals’. This was in 2025. The cladding rectification program and cladding safety fund were set up in 2020. Five years on we have got a report from Victoria University that says:

Almost 90 per cent of apartment buildings across Victoria have failed fire safety standards …

according to new research. Ninety per cent have failed safety standards. It continues:

The Victoria University study comes amid a push to build more multi-storey developments, to help fix the state’s housing woes.

Victoria University researcher Dr Stephen Scimonello found of the almost 964 buildings inspected across the state, only 13 per cent had been maintained and continued to comply with fire safety standards.

Thirteen per cent. That is five years on from the cladding issue, and you have got a report to say we have still got buildings with issues at a time when the government has got this whole creation of activity centres, building sky towers right throughout Melbourne. Yet only 13 per cent passed the actual fire safety standards.

You would hope that the government actually get their act together, because this is a huge warning. We have had a warning already with buildings catching fire. We have had the whole cladding report. We have had 13 and a half MCGs full of cladding rectification to actually take the flammable cladding, the government’s product, off the buildings. Now what we have got is a report five years on to say, ‘Maybe you haven’t dealt with the problem and we’ve still got fire risk issues with tall towers.’ I put that on notice to the government. When they are off on these activity centres and building high towers throughout our neighbourhoods, can they give a guarantee that we do not have issues with fire and other faulty products as we go forward? The government is very, very quick to blame other people. Well, this is in the government’s wheelhouse. They are the regulators. They are the ones that ensure that they set things up, and I hope they have not set the industry up to fail, because this is a very important report. I do not know what the minister has to say about this report. I am just trying to see if there was any response. The article says:

The Allan government last month announced it would expedite the approval of new buildings including duplexes, townhouses and low-rise apartments … to make Victoria the “townhouse capital”.

Well, the only response is actually ‘build more’. It does not say how, and it does not say whether they are fit for purpose. So that is the government’s response to something that might be a fire hazard. We hope that they have got their act together when it comes to this. These things are really, really important. There is no question that when a government has been part of a massive problem, like the cladding issues and buildings catching on fire under their watch, the rectification, the cost, the outcomes and the management is on them. It is really important that we understand how that process works. I know that we will be breaking shortly for question time, and I will come back and touch on this. But it is the BPC, the Building and Plumbing Commission, that will be responsible for the management of the 19 per cent that still have cladding rectification issues. It could be more than that, but that is what the government is telling us.

The consumer feedback on the Building and Plumbing Commission, according to Google, gives them a 1-star rating on feedback, rectification and response. This is the body that needs to continue to clean up the mess and be the regulator. I think it is really important for us to understand what resources the government is actually putting into the regulator to make sure that we get swift responses and that we can be confident in the new regulator coming forward, because you cannot just handball over to somebody else and say ‘It’s now your responsibility’ if they do not have the resources to fix this. We know on 1 July that the regulator is meant to come into play and deal with a lot of these issues in the new regulation and also deal with cladding and other issues. We want to make sure the government is not setting the regulator up to fail. This is really important. When you are talking about safety issues, you need to ensure that those safety issues are properly managed. I put again on notice to the government that when we have got these new regulators, we certainly do not want to have an overly bureaucratic system, but when we streamline and we get rid of Cladding Safety Victoria, moving it into the BPC, we want to make sure that we have the safety mechanisms in place to deal with that. So that would be another question that I would put on notice to the government. Are they making sure that all of the safety mechanisms are in place to deal with that?

As we as we head into question time, which we will shortly, there are a lot of issues with all of this. Yes, we want to streamline the process. Yes, we want to make sure that the cladding removal on those buildings that are still exposed is done with due process with those smaller builders in how they rectify and manage those situations. We know there are currently issues between insurance companies and some of the big companies in dealing with the remedy, the costs and the rectifications. That all needs to be worked out. But we also need to understand when builders are left high and dry, they must have the support necessary and the confidence necessary to support the industry, because without the building industry there is not the confidence to build more homes. The government cannot be going out and talking up building more homes when the building industry is running a mile because this government is not supporting them.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.

The SPEAKER: Before we commence question time today, I acknowledge in the gallery the Ambassador of Italy to Australia His Excellency Nicola Lener and the Consul General of Italy in Melbourne Chiara Mauri. I also acknowledge from the Indian Parliament Yaduveer KC Wadiyar. Welcome.

Colin Brooks: Speaker, I raise a point of order in relation to Rulings from the Chair, chapter 20, on the main principles of points of order. Point (2) is ‘Points of order must not be used to deliberately disrupt the proceedings or to respond to debate.’ Point (7) is ‘Spurious and frivolous matters cannot be raised.’ Over the four sitting weeks this year, 12 question times, by my count, during answers to questions, the opposition have raised 119 points of order. That is nearly 10 points or order every question time. Of those, only 23 have been upheld – 96 have not been upheld – so eight in 10 points of order are fraudulent points of order, I would put to you, to deliberately disrupt the proceedings of the house, which is in direct contradiction of the guiding principles of points of order. Speaker, my point of order is to ask you: if that pattern continues, do not hear points of order from the opposition.

James Newbury: On the point of order, Speaker, I only have one number to rebut the minister’s point of order: the government is yet to respond to one single question put by the opposition – zero answers to questions in this Parliament. We would not need to take points of order had the government ever responded to a question.

The SPEAKER: There are a number of rulings from the Chair in relation to points of order that members should familiarise themselves with. It is not for me to determine whether a point of order can be had or not had, and I cannot determine what that point of order is until I have heard it. This of course is a matter for the Standing Orders Committee, and perhaps members might like to reflect on how that can be addressed.