Tuesday, 31 March 2026

 David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (15:00): I understand the government is very eager to speak on this bill, and we look forward to their contributions. As I did say at the outset, this has been a really important issue for many, many residents – Victorians – who have had to experience and undergo issues with cladding on their buildings. This started as very much a huge safety issue, and we saw that with the introduction of Cladding Safety Victoria. We have also seen a lot of people being very, very much financially impacted by this. I have had a number of constituents locally that fit in the sub-three-storey building category that are affected by cladding, but because they do not fit into the Cladding Safety Victoria scheme, they still have to go about repairing their building and undergoing the changes and rectification works of their building. Many of them are being hit with special levies that insurance companies do not cover. I have had a number of retirees and those that are on pensions and living in these buildings approach my office over recent years who are really struggling to determine how they go about paying for these rectification works.

The problem is certainly not one size fits all, and I think it is really important to recognise those smaller buildings and the many Victorians that have been impacted. As I say, insurance does not cover them, and even in some instances where it did cover them, the retrospectivity of this bill means that now that insurance period has run out. So even in some of the buildings where it was covered, because the actual time period has run out, there is a negotiation now between a lot of the buildings that are covered with Cladding Safety Victoria and the insurance companies. I know that is a case-by-case scenario, and I know a lot of that is being done with insurance companies and the buildings themselves. I think it is really important to put on record that we should not have individuals that are out of pocket as a result of this, particularly when this situation was not of their own cause. That goes to many, many owners and certainly many builders that all went in with the best of intent. This does not cover people that have deliberately done the wrong thing, because they have not done the wrong thing. These are faulty materials – make no mistake – that the government said at one point in time were fit for purpose, and we know now these cladding materials were not fit for purpose. People are left in the middle – Victorians are left in the middle – to pick up the pieces. We want to make sure that does not happen and those are minimised.

I did put on record the many small businesses and builders that are really experiencing cost-of-living increases being imposed on them. We have even seen situations at the moment with the war in the Middle East. Part of the war in the Middle East affects fuel costs, building material costs and even plastic piping and the like. I was told yesterday by a number of builders that they will not go and do jobs beyond the 30-kilometre region because of the cost of fuel. A lot of those contractors and builders are now having to limit the kind of work that they are doing. This all adds to the cost of construction. It all adds to the cost of building. It means that when we do see a halt in the building industry and not the construction that we have seen in the past, it all comes down to two things – confidence and cost, the two Cs. These are both issues that fairly and squarely remain with the government. There is a lack of confidence in Victoria in the building industry because of the regulation, because of the red tape, because of the system failure, because of taxation and because it is just too hard to do business. We have heard builders and we have heard investors say, ‘Anywhere but Melbourne. Anywhere but Victoria.’ That is a confidence issue that we need to turn around. In terms of that, we would hope that changes as well. That confidence piece is a really, really important thing, and also what links very closely with confidence is cost. We have got to get costs down. Whether it be materials, whether it be labour or whether it be taxation, we have got to get all of that down to ensure builders can continue to grow, that we get tradies coming through the industry and that we get more homes built. The government has a target to build more homes. We will only build more homes if we have got more builders to build those homes. To do that, we need confidence in the industry. That is why I say to the government, in finishing up: let us get that right, let us get these things fixed and let us ensure that builders can build more homes, Victorians can get into more homes and we do not make it cost prohibitive so that they cannot afford these new homes.

 Katie HALL (Footscray) (15:05): I am delighted to make a contribution to the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, and I would like to begin my contribution by reflecting on the impact that this cladding had on a number of my constituents. One of the first meetings I had when I was elected as a member of Parliament was with a Vietnam veteran who came to my office quite distressed, having discovered that his apartment building in Maribyrnong had flammable cladding on it. He expressed to me that he had saved up for a long time to pay a deposit on this property and that he was very concerned about the financial implications for him and for his neighbours, and he asked that I follow this matter up with the then planning minister, Richard Wynne. I remember raising this matter with Minister Wynne’s office, and Minister Wynne acted really quickly on this issue. There were a number of properties in Footscray that were impacted, and there was a lot of fear, particularly in the apartment market in the inner west, around what would happen in terms of funding the cladding removal.

Cladding Safety Victoria is now approaching the conclusion of the cladding rectification program that was put in place, which has successfully made the built environment in Victoria safer for everyone through the removal of high-risk combustible external cladding. Of course we all remember the fire that happened at an apartment building in Docklands and how scary that was for everyone concerned. Cladding Safety Victoria had a really important task, and the legislation governing Cladding Safety Victoria’s activities is now thankfully no longer required and can be repealed. Any remaining cladding safety related activities will be completed by the Victorian Building Authority (VBA), and Cladding Safety Victoria will be abolished.

The Victorian government released its building statement in 2025 and in doing so set out its commitment for a safer, more trusted building system for Victoria. As part of these reforms, the VBA is evolving into the state’s more powerful building watchdog, the Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC), with stronger oversight over the building and plumbing industries in Victoria. To effectively regulate these industries, the Building and Plumbing Commission requires long-term and sustainable funding. With the cladding safety program concluding, the funding provided to Cladding Safety Victoria through the cladding rectification program is no longer required and can be repealed. It will be replaced with a new lower component of the building permit levy, to be used to provide funding to the Building and Plumbing Commission.

This bill will repeal the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020 and abolish Cladding Safety Victoria as an agency, including abolishing the CSV board and the role of the CEO. It will transfer CSV’s property, rights and liabilities to the VBA. It will amend the Building Act 1993 to confer upon the VBA cladding safety related functions to enable the VBA to complete any outstanding cladding safety related activities after the CSV is abolished.

It will transfer any remaining employees of the CSV to the VBA, and it will repeal the cladding rectification levy component of the building permit levy and introduce a new lower element to the building permit levy to be applied to building work carried out on class 2 to 8 buildings in non-regional Victoria with a cost of $1.5 million or more up to and including on 30 June 2029. It will make technical amendments to the Building Act to provide clarity for the operation of the building permit levy.

With the completion of the cladding rectification program in sight, this bill enables the repeal of the Cladding Safety Victoria Act and the abolition of Cladding Safety Victoria as an agency. When Cladding Safety Victoria was established under the Cladding Safety Victoria Act as a standalone agency in January 2020, it was always intended that it would be wound down once it had achieved its objectives. Cladding Safety Victoria is on track to have comprehensively improved building safety for all Victorians. As Cladding Safety Victoria will no longer exist, the act will be repealed. When Cladding Safety Victoria is abolished, its property rights and liabilities will be transferred to the VBA and any actions or proceedings underway when Cladding Safety Victoria is abolished will become actions and proceedings of the VBA. The state will retain its rights under the Building Act for any payments made by Cladding Safety Victoria and subsequently any payments made by the VBA for cladding rectification, meaning the state can continue to pursue builders for cost recovery. Any staff remaining at Cladding Safety Victoria on commencement of the repeal bill will integrate into the VBA to complete important cladding safety related activities and finalise CSV’s business obligations. This means that the expert knowledge and skills that have been developed through this agency and built up over the last six years will not be lost and will enable the VBA to continue supporting communities with respect to cladding safety.

The Building Act will be amended to confer cladding safety related functions to the BPC. These functions will allow the VBA to complete any cladding safety related activities still in progress while CSV is wound down. The VBA will be able to monitor and finalise the remaining few cladding rectification works still underway after Cladding Safety Victoria’s abolishment. The VBA will continue to provide support to owners and owners corporations in relation to cladding safety risk, make final payments under funding agreements and advise the Minister for Housing and Building on its performance in relation to its cladding safety functions. Providing the VBA with these functions should mean that no-one is left disadvantaged, unpaid or with incomplete works.

The conclusion of the cladding rectification program means that the cladding rectification levy is no longer needed and can be repealed. A new lower component of the building permit levy will be introduced, with a reduction in the amount due on applicable building permits meaning cost savings for industry and consumers. Funds collected from this new component of the levy will be used to provide long-term financial stability to the Building and Plumbing Commission, allowing for strong and robust oversight of the building and plumbing industries.

The cladding rectification levy was introduced in 2020 to provide approximately half of the initial $600 million of funding committed to Cladding Safety Victoria by the government. The cladding rectification levy is currently applied at varying rates to building works on class 2 to 8 buildings that are not in regional Victoria with a build cost of $800,000 or more. The new component of the building permit levy will also apply only to class 2 to 8 buildings in non-regional Victoria, but with a higher cost threshold of $1.5 million or more. It will apply only to building work carried out on these non-regional buildings between the commencement of the bill and on or before 30 June 2029. This will enable a reduction in levy costs of between 47 and 66 per cent for affected building classes.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff of Cladding Safety Victoria, particularly for the help extended to my constituents in Footscray. It was an incredibly stressful time for many of those residents, and I know that their important work made a huge difference to their lives.

 Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (15:15): I rise to talk on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I have been immersed in the building game for quite some time. At the very onset of when buildings started to change with different cladding material becoming available, it actually changed the way architects and also developers could change the facade and the look of a building, whether it be a new build or whether it be works to pretty up older buildings. It was an easier, quicker way to be able to do that using these products. It was not just in inner-city Melbourne; it spread right throughout regional Victoria. With some of the builds and designs that could be achieved by using the cladding, it was no wonder builders and other people in the building game decided that they needed to use these products. They were easy to use once you learned how to install them.

These products that we are talking about were legal. They were fine at that stage. We could use these particular materials to clad our buildings, and they looked smart and they looked good. There were builders using them right across regional Victoria, and without a doubt there were more builders using these products than not using these products. But then of course we saw the issues, as the previous member just spoke about, with what happened when there was a fire in a building and the devastation and loss that that did cause. It caused grief right throughout the building industry. I am only talking about my time with it with workers in regional Victoria, down throughout Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley, that had used these products, and then all of a sudden, they were a hazard. I think everybody collectively took a deep breath and thought, ‘How do we fix this? What are going to be the outcomes? Is it all the products that are to blame, or is it only certain products?’

This is why we had to, collectively right across the state, have things in place so that buildings could be checked off on what materials were used and whether they complied or did not comply. I am not sure at the end of the day whether there are bits and pieces on buildings throughout Victoria that have not been changed – I hope they all have been – because we just will not know. That is how popular the products seemed to be at particular stages.

This bill repeals the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020, and it abolishes Cladding Safety Victoria, transferring the remaining functions, assets and liabilities to the Victorian Building Authority (VBA) framework and its practice into the broader Building and Plumbing Commission reform architecture. In winding back and closing off the Cladding Safety Victoria Act and Cladding Safety Victoria itself and moving it on, we need to make sure that we are vigilant moving forward and that we do capture all the inferior products that were used. As I said, it is not going to be easy to make sure that we can do it. I know there are builders right around the state. We heard from, I think, the member for Brighton before about a particular builder that 10 years on has been handed a notice from the government about issues from during his time as a builder. So it affects people right across the board.

Nowadays we know what the minimum standard is when we do a build. We are using products that are fire-resistant. Back in the day when it first came out, we needed to make sure that this was the case, but because it was so popular and we did not know – hindsight is a wonderful thing – we unfortunately are in this situation at the moment.

The member for Caulfield went through and spoke about the new set-up and what it is going to entail. He also said, and I am happy about it, that we are not opposing the bill here because it is doing good. We need to make sure that as we morph into and transform into another entity, we are doing the work that needs to happen not only here in Melbourne, because we do see a lot of high-rise buildings that have cladding on them, but also around regional Victoria, so that we are capturing every building that these products were used on.

As I said, we are not opposing the bill, as it relates to more administrative changes across the board. We need to make sure that in doing that we are not putting unjust pressure on our smaller builders who have been innocently caught up in this whole procedure and project, because when they were actually doing the builds and using the cladding, as I said, it was a legal product that they could use. It had all the stamps on it when it came in. So we need to make sure that on one hand, yes, we are moving through and removing it and that rectification works are happening on the buildings that have this product but also that we are not putting undue pressure and stress on small builders, who probably to this day are wondering as buildings get audited, ‘Does my building comply or does it not comply?’ Sometimes there is that pressure on builders, especially if they have retired and stopped building. I think the member for Brighton said there was a million-dollar bill sent to one former builder who had retired. Where do they get the money from? Their insurance has probably stopped. I know that coming into this place I had to wind up my own plumbing business and the procedures we needed to go through. I had to keep it running for a couple of years because I needed to have that insurance in place – run-out insurance for any works that I had done on either domestic homes or commercial buildings. There would be a lot of older people, and I will talk about regional Victoria, that had used these products and have now retired and have the pressure of not being covered by their insurance. We are putting more and more doubt and pressure on them, and it is not easy in the building game at the moment.

We talk about the need – and I think every member in this place knows the need – for more housing, whether it be our standard house-and-land packages or inner-city living in high-rises. We need to be able to make sure that we have the workforce to build these much-needed houses. At the moment it is nearly easier for builders and plumbers and trades in general to think twice about whether they need to stay in the game, especially as they get older and they are within that five- to eight-year period from being able to retire. We need to make sure that we look after them as well.

Many of the small businesses, as I said, that were using the products relied on information about how safe they were, probably via regulatory procedures that the government was in charge of. We talk about the VBA and so forth. They probably needed that comfort and had that comfort that these products were legal. So as we do move through and rectify and get rid of all these dangerous products that clad so many buildings in Melbourne and regional Victoria, we need to also not forget the mum-and-dad business that has to carry so much these days and is always putting money out, whether it be to have insurance or to be licensed properly. We need to make sure that we do not put extra stress on them as we move through rectifying all of these works. As we said, we are not opposing, and we look to the future to see how we go.

 Bronwyn HALFPENNY (Thomastown) (15:25): I also rise to speak in favour of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I will talk a little bit about the origin of the bill that is being repealed, even though of course previous speakers have done so as well. Just to give the context, this arose when it was discovered that there was unsafe and flammable cladding being put into buildings, particularly apartment buildings, and removal was required. It was unsafe. Internationally, there had been the most horrific fires. Of course it was really something that was so dangerous that it needed removal immediately and replacement. This devastated many home owners of apartments in particular, because they did not have the money to reclad their buildings, the apartment blocks that they were living in, and a number of builders were talking about closing down or moving assets so that they were not required to rectify the work and could avoid their obligations. Also there was concern, even for builders that were doing the right thing, that this could cause a major collapse of the industry. So when we are listening to some of the opposition speakers on this bill talking about how we have got to look after the builders, this actually was legislation that was there to protect the industry and ensure that there was not a big collapse of companies as a result of this cladding problem.

The government responded to this major problem and stepped in with regulatory requirements and also financial support, some of which of course was funded by a cladding rectification levy on industry, which again is included and will be repealed as part of this bill. The cladding on all of these buildings has been removed and replaced, and therefore the legislation that was for that very specific issue – the issue is finished; the work is now complete – is no longer required. I understand it was a massive job, and it required great work from the organisation that was responsible for overseeing this work. But something like over 1600 buildings, which account for something like 83,000 homes, have now been made safe. That gives a bit of an example of the extent of this problem, how massive it was and how important it was for the government – that is, a Labor government – to step in and support and help those home owners, as well as the building industry itself.

This legislation is repealing the cladding legislation and the levy that was collected to provide some financial support for the replacement, but we have also got to adjust the building permit levy. This is a levy to provide funding to the Building and Plumbing Commission, which is a newly established organisation, to protect consumers in the building industry. But when you look overall at the cladding levy and this, there is something like a 66 per cent reduction in total levy costs, so it is actually a reduction rather than an increase. It is just really replacing one levy with another smaller levy. The Allan Labor government has introduced a suite of legislative reform and regulation to provide stronger oversight and regulation in the building industry going forward, and this also includes further legislation that we will be considering later this week in this sitting of Parliament.

The Liberal–National opposition always criticise and complain about any sort of regulation, particularly, it seems, in the building industry. Of course this is one of the mantras of the free-marketeering zealots that we have over in the opposition, but by allowing the free market, you are not supporting the consumers in this space.

I know, as we have heard from the previous speaker and others, there is a lot of concern for the builder. But if we are concerned and worried about the builder, does that mean we are not going to worry about the consumer? When you look at the investment in a house, it is one of the biggest investments, if not the biggest, that a person or a family will ever make – that is, to buy their own home. Not only is it the largest investment, it probably takes the longest time for them to pay off that investment over many, many, many years of their life in order to eventually – hopefully before they retire – own their own home and know that they have got the security and stability of a long-term place in which their family and they can live. Because of this, it is so important to make sure that there are really strong and enforceable regulations, legislation and penalties to ensure that consumers and home owners are protected with this huge investment in their life. We want to make sure that those investments are strong and sound, and in order to do this, we really need to make sure the legislation protects, because the building industry can be an unsafe industry. It is an industry where there are a lot of businesses that come and go very quickly. While we know there are some great companies out there that really have a real commitment to building homes for people and building quality homes, it is also an industry where there are a lot of smaller businesses – and larger – that are able to game the system and use the system to make an excessive profit at the expense of those who are buying their own home.

There are a few examples where even legislation that has been designed to protect the consumer has often been used by a builder against the rights of a consumer. I will give an example: the sunset clauses in some of the building contracts of the past. This is another piece of legislation that the Allan Labor government had to reform in order to again protect consumers. In this case, what was happening was that if you purchased a land and house package, for example – it was not built or anything like that – there was a certain amount of time after which, if the builder did not build that house or start the house, you were able to claim your deposit back and go elsewhere. What was happening, because of the massively rising prices of land – particularly in places like Wollert, for example, and Thomastown – was that builders were securing that deposit and then allowing the sunset clause period to lapse, giving the deposit back to the home owner and then reselling that land at a far higher price to somebody else, leaving the home owner with nothing and priced out of the market because they could no longer afford the property that they originally had a contract for. Again, as I said, the Labor government had to rectify that legislation in order to stop that happening.

Here are some of the examples where governments are reacting to problems in the building industry and having to introduce piecemeal or individual circumstance legislation in order to protect consumers. Why I am talking about that now is getting on to the BPC, the Building and Plumbing Commission, which is a really comprehensive suite of pieces of legislation that are now being introduced – some have been, and there will be further reform. The idea of this is that, rather than being reactive with single pieces of legislation, we have a body that is going to be a very strong and sound protector of the consumer – of those home owners – to make sure that, going forward, these protections stay and hopefully address all the issues that may come along.

It is also legislation and reform that has really taken into account a lot of the housing strategy that the government has as well as the changing nature of housing. What I mean by that is, for example, high density – coming legislation, and legislation that we have already introduced, is all about also protecting and filling gaps. Where previously there were very few people in apartments, now that is becoming more and more predominant as land prices go up as well as different lifestyles being required. This is legislation that is also going to make sure that those who purchase apartments are also protected in what they have and ensuring that if there are defects and if things are not going according to plan, they have a place to go as a first resort, not a last resort, in order to have those issues rectified and be properly compensated for them.

 Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (15:35): I am pleased to rise today to speak on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. Right from the start, the opposition has said we do not oppose this bill. I do congratulate my colleague the member for Caulfield, the shadow minister in this space, for the work he has done on it and for informing our side of the house what this bill is about.

I think when we talk about Cladding Safety Victoria particularly, we have to go back a little bit in time to figure out why this all came about in the first place and why this really ended up being an issue in the construction industry. Cladding was actually a concern back in the 1990s – it goes back a lot further than people realise. The problem we had back then was with the claddings and the way they were represented, particularly through the Building Code of Australia, there was actually quite a lot of confusion about them and how to rate them with fire ratings. That is where a lot of these problems started.

I have heard members of this chamber talk about dodgy builders in regard to cladding. I am not going to dispute that there are dodgy builders out there, but just be a little bit mindful of your language on this one, because what happened here was what generally happens, which is, when you are tendering a project, whatever project it is, whether it be a house or a commercial building or a school or a hospital, whatever, you get given a list of specifications. The architect will specify what products you use. The builder in accordance with the specifications will price up those products, and if he wins the job he will install those products. Then you have got the building surveyors at the end of the day, who write off that job and give that job the certificate of occupancy. The problem we had with cladding – not just in Victoria, in Australia – was there was quite a bit of confusion, or you could interpret things in different ways. The regulations were quite ambiguous, and this is where the problem came in. It was around the regulation around particularly the fire rating associated with the cladding. This is why we ended up with the problem we had. Obviously it all came to a head with the Lacrosse building fire in November 2014. That was when this topic really came to a head. It probably should have been dealt with earlier.

As I said, there was always this ambiguity about how things were, and part of it stemmed from – and this came out of the audit out of New South Wales – confusion about whether the cladding was part of the wall or whether it was separate, like a lining or a pretty finish on a wall, for want of better terminology. What happened there was, if it got interpreted a different way, the fire rating was less on that wall construction, and that is where the problems came in. Hence it was, if my memory serves, about 2017 when Ted Baillieu and, I think, Brumby worked together on getting Cladding Safety Victoria up and operational, which needed to be done. It actually needed to be done because there were a lot of buildings throughout Melbourne and Victoria that were clad in flammable materials, and it puts people at risk.

The reason we do not oppose this bill, obviously, is because it is streamlining this process back to the Building and Plumbing Commission, but we do need to know the history about why we ended up in this situation. Even though we do not oppose this, I do have some concerns myself, obviously, coming out of the industry, on how this is going to look going forward. Part of me feels as though I had some comfort that we had a separate authority looking after this cladding component. I know the old Victorian Building Authority (VBA), now the BPC, historically has probably not performed that well. My concern is: if this now goes through the BPC, which is what this bill essentially does, are we going to keep the performance up? Are we going to capture all the cladding that needs to be captured and replaced?

I think from the figures being tossed around there is about 19 per cent of work left to do. That figure could be subjective, but that is the figure I have heard, so I will run with 19 per cent. My concern is that if it comes through the BPC will they capture and complete all the works that need to be done? There are various figures floating around. I have heard a figure from one stakeholder that told me there were 82 buildings still left to finish, which is significant. I am not sure if that figure is correct or not. I have actually found nothing else to substantiate that figure, but whatever buildings are out there, I hope they do get captured and they do get recladded. I think the original figure was about $600 million and that is what the money was for: to fix these problems with the cladding on buildings in this state. Obviously I know they have gone out and they have done schools and hospitals and all the rest of it, but in this whole sector there is a part that is missing in this.

Again, this is no fault of the builder, the building surveyor or the architect. They put materials on that were deemed to be fit for purpose and deemed to comply when those buildings were built, but we are missing a large section of this and that is at the smaller level. You heard the story today of a builder that has been out of the industry for 10 years and gets hit with a million-dollar bill. The builder did nothing wrong. He installed what was specified. As a builder, if you do not install what was specified, you actually have to fix it. You actually have to go back and reclad it and do it as per the specifications. So how can a smaller builder that has done exactly what was specified get hit with a million-dollar bill? This is where I am a little bit concerned that we have missed a large portion of this. There could be buildings out there that I built, that I have put this cladding on, that I am not even aware is flammable. I would not know, I honestly would not know. Now, my registrations have lapsed. I am out of construction. My licences have been suspended. I did not renew them when I got into Parliament. I just suspended my licences, hoping that I could retire one day from this beautiful place, but you never know, politics is a funny thing. But this is my concern: how many builders are going to get hit up retrospectively on these cladding issues and get bills from the government? I think we need to do more work around this area to make sure that people that have done the right thing, have built the job in good faith, have built the job as per specification, have built the job as per the architect’s design, and it has been signed off by a registered building surveyor and has got the certificate of occupancy – when does this become their fault when all they have done is follow the letter of the law and the regulation at the time that these cladding issues were around? To me it does not seem fair, and to me we have to be very, very careful that builders that have been retired for 10 years do not get hit with million-dollar bills – that is not right. It is just not right, and it is not fair on the builder and it is not fair on the architect or the building surveyor.

We need our builders going into the future, and our building industry at the moment is getting belted from pillar to post. Every time they turn another direction there is another change of regulation, there is another whack to the industry. I am a little bit concerned about this. This could be the sceptic in me, but maybe it was part of the Silver review to streamline Cladding Safety Victoria into the Building and Plumbing Commission. I personally do not have a problem with it, providing the Building and Plumbing Commission do their job. That is the main part that I have a concern about, because as history has told me the old VBA, which we literally rebranded the Building and Plumbing Commission, has not showered itself with glory of late.

As I said, also I am just worried about the buildings or the dwellings we do not know about, because I think it is fairly reasonable to say there are more out there, but we just do not know. Will this, through the Building and Plumbing Commission, capture those properties as well?

But what we definitely should not be doing is billing people retrospectively from a certain timeline as if they are liable for this, because, as I have stated, if they have followed all the documentation, the specifications that were supplied and installed it correctly and it has been signed off by a building surveyor, it is not fair or reasonable for them to assume the cost of the rectification. Maybe the government might want to think about reviewing that some time in the future. As we said, we do not oppose the bill, but they are my comments.

 Eden FOSTER (Mulgrave) (15:45): It is a pleasure to rise today in support of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I thank the minister for her work in bringing this legislation to the Parliament and congratulate her on a job well done. I say this because today’s legislation represents a welcome end to a serious and sensible reform delivered over the course of many years and several staunch progressive Labor governments. This is a strong example of government stepping in to address a serious issue, delivering results and then responsibly concluding the program once the job is done. At its core the bill will wind up Cladding Safety Victoria, which was always intended to be a temporary agency, and transfer its remaining responsibilities to the Victorian Building Authority, now operating as the Building and Plumbing Commission. It will also ensure that any outstanding work, staff assets and obligations are smoothly transitioned so that nothing is left unfinished.

This reform marks a successful conclusion of a world-leading program established by the Victorian government in response to the risks posed by combustible cladding, particularly following the tragic Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. Those who followed that story will share my recollections of that horrific event, a horrible and tragic event which was made even more so because it was so remarkably preventable. The 72 lives lost that night were needless victims of unenforced and nonetheless outdated regulations which put lives at risk. It was a matter of time, unfortunately, until something like the horrific images of a towering inferno came closer to home – that is of course unless government intervened and stopped that from happening.

Through Cladding Safety Victoria, Victoria became a global leader in identifying and fixing unsafe cladding. The agency worked closely with building owners, residents and fire authorities to assess risk and carry out remediation. The results speak for themselves. More than 99 per cent of the highest risk residential buildings have now been made safer, with the remaining works nearing completion. Hundreds of government and community buildings, including schools and hospitals, have also been remediated. In addition, over a thousand lower risk buildings have been given clear pathways to reducing their risk.

This work has not only improved safety but saved Victorians from facing enormous personal costs to fix these issues themselves. Let us take a step back and consider what this represents. In response to a horrific event thousands of kilometres away community leaders recognised the status quo was not up to scratch and set out to change that. What followed was a serious examination of our regulatory structures and a wholesale reform of the way Victoria administers its inspection and enforcement procedures. Across several ministers, governments and terms of Parliament, the Victorian government has delivered a quantifiable improvement to the community and the standards we can expect from construction and the houses we live in. At a time when trust in government is low globally, I am proud to point to reforms like this that prove that this government is one of delivery. The benefit of long-term governments is that we get to introduce reforms, shepherd them through conception, administration and delivery and then, as we do today, resolve them once the job is done.

Only Labor governments stand up for working families and support them in the biggest purchase they will make in their lifetime, and CSV has done a spectacular job at keeping Victorians safe. At the conclusion of the program CSV will have rectified around 450 private residential apartment buildings, assessed over 21,000 buildings for cladding risk, worked with government to improve the safety of users of 133 government buildings, funded remediation works and produced cladding risk information for more than 80,000 privately owned apartments – certainly a job well done.

It is also worth putting on the record some of the other improvements this bill implements. Importantly, the bill ensures that the expertise built up over recent years is not lost. The Building and Plumbing Commission will take on the remaining functions along with experienced staff so that any outstanding matters are completed properly and that knowledge continues to inform the system. The changes to the building permit levy are also significant. By replacing the cladding levy with a lower charge the overall levy will drop substantially, by around half in many cases. These changes will apply only to larger developments in metropolitan areas, meaning most home owners and regional projects will not be affected. This strikes a sensible balance, reducing costs while maintaining funding for ongoing building reforms and supporting the delivery of more housing.

The bill also updates the way we fund building system reforms. It removes the cladding rectification levy and replaces it with a lower, more targeted component within the building permit levy. This change will reduce costs for builders and consumers while still supporting ongoing improvement to the system. The bill also includes some technical amendments to ensure the Building Act 1993 operates as intended.

This means a lot for Victorian families and Victorian residents, because we know the risk – we saw the risk firsthand back in 2017 – of what combustible cladding can do, with the horrific consequence that we all saw on our TV screens those years ago. CSV have done their job and are near finishing, and we thank them for the work that they have done. I want to acknowledge the hard work of CSV’s board, leadership and staff. Their efforts over the past six years have made a real difference to Victorians, and we have set an example for others to follow. I commend this bill to the house.

 Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (15:52): We have a bill before us that is about repealing Cladding Safety Victoria, and the bill is named the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I want to start by talking about cladding, how it is used and what has brought about this problem. Cladding is not something that was just a trend at the time. It had actually been used since the 1970s and particularly used on medium- to high-risk developments, although it was not used exclusively on these larger buildings; it was used on some of the lower rise buildings as well. We heard the members for Morwell and Narracan, both of whom were in the building industry, say that the cladding materials were used because they were easy to use. I will talk about aluminium: it is a light metal, it is strong, it is resistant to corrosion and it is malleable and durable, but it is highly conductive. It has a lot of positive elements, and being light, it was ideal for some of these purposes. Polyethylene, a plastic, is a petrochemical, and it is moisture-resistant. So combining the moisture resistance of the polyethylene and aluminium created what was a pretty easy to use product to clad buildings. Polyethylene, whilst I am not particularly big on plastics, is a plastic that is used in a lot of toys and bottles, tubes, packaging and things that have everyday use. So we cannot just demonise this, although, as I said, I am not a big plastic user at all. It looks smart and it looks good, so this was used very extensively since the 1970s, 40-odd years before there were real problems.

We saw in November 2014 in the Docklands the Lacrosse building, and the fire spread rapidly up the building at that time. I remember there were 137 owners who were really caught short, because this has not happened before. There were issues with the building and its safety and what it meant with the rectification and repairs, and it was really difficult for the owners of those buildings at the time.

But what it did for us is highlight flammable cladding. At the time, because this was recognised, there was an audit to have a look at how Victoria was placed here.

In 2017 in June we did see the Grenfell Tower fire. The world watched on in horror as 72 people died and as many people were injured – and we still have the memories. As a result there was a taskforce established in Victoria, led by former Premier Ted Baillieu and former Deputy Premier John Thwaites. They spent a couple of years and handed down a report in July 2019. But in 2017 it was reported that there were perhaps some 1400 buildings in Victoria at risk, and the VBA, the Victorian Building Authority, were directed to audit 10 per cent of Victoria’s buildings every year, up from 2 per cent annually. I do not know the status of this, and I would be quite keen to understand where that is at now. Cladding Safety Victoria (CSV) was an outcome of that taskforce, and it was established in December 2020.

Now, the member for Mulgrave talked about the job being done. Well, the job is not done. We are not exactly sure how much is done. The government’s figures were a bit rubbery on that, but there is still work that needs to be done. There were certainly the high-risk areas that were identified and dealt with first and the lower medium-risk areas. There are a number of areas that are actually really important here – design and construction, regulation and compliance, quality assurance and consumer protection. There is still probably some work that needs to be done there. I have a property, an apartment in a building in Southbank, which is subject to these cladding issues. For a while we thought we were not in it, then we were in it, then we were not in it. In the second-reading speech, it says that CSV have:

… protected Victorians from the debilitating debts which would have been incurred had they been forced to self-fund the rectification of combustible cladding-related building work.

Well, let me tell you, the 500 people in my building have all just been hit with a couple of thousand dollars as the first of three tranches to pay for these remediation works on our building. So there are certainly people that are paying for this, and the job is not done because we have only just been hit with this bill within the last month.

Through this process a lot of the high-rise buildings are in the City of Melbourne, and we are very familiar with where all of these are. The City of Melbourne in conjunction with Cladding Safety Victoria have been overseeing the identification and removal of high-risk materials, particularly aluminium composite panels, which I outlined before and talked a little bit about the features of. They have been working with different owners corporations, and that certainly happened in our situation. There are issues too around how this is happening, the process, the safety, the funding and assistance, risk mitigation, reporting and consenting and looking at those affected areas in Melbourne, Docklands, Brunswick and Southbank.

Through these processes there have been changes made to building specs, for example. I know that there were schools – in fact I visited a school in regional Victoria – that had the problematic cladding. Now the Victorian School Building Authority website actually outlines the changes to the technical specs, and the roofing in schools must be selected from and satisfy roof materials that meet requirements including being free from aluminium composite panels with a polyethylene core or expanded polystyrene. We are seeing that in the roofs, but not only the roofs. The specs around the external walls and cladding also mention compliance with the Australian standards and with some of what we have picked up through the works here. Hospitals also were identified. In fact there were eight hospitals in Victoria that had problematic cladding, and these were the Royal Women’s, Werribee Mercy, Monash Medical Centre, Sunshine, Frankston, the north wing of the Royal Melbourne Hospital and two buildings at the Casey Hospital.

These were probably higher risk, where we needed to make sure. Because they are hospitals and are there to deal with ill and very unwell people, it was a higher risk and a higher priority.

One of the things that others have talked about here is the issue with small builders and builders being made responsible for materials, which the government at the time said were safe, and if they would be required to pay for rectification. It is pretty easy for the government to give away or blow $15 billion on CFMEU construction sites, but they want builders here, who followed the government’s advice on what materials were safe, to clean up that mess. I do not think that is fair, and we need to make sure that we are not targeting some of these small builders and sending them broke, sometimes years after they may have exited that industry.

The government have not been clear about how much remains in the cladding fund or how they will address outstanding cladding risks. Now, through this process – through the taskforce and Cladding Safety Victoria – there has been some expertise, and that is going to be rolled into the Building and Plumbing Commission. As with a lot of these things, it gets transferred and can be diluted. If we have very specific expertise in this area, as the cladding rectification processes are winding up, we need to make sure that is properly documented and those skills are absolutely transferred, because what can happen is that people and knowledge can get transferred and move on, and then there is a vacuum of information because the knowledge stayed with the person. We need to make sure that the expertise is not lost and that there are the appropriate mechanisms and the appropriate processes in place to make sure it does not rest with people but instead rests with the organisation and is properly documented. I cannot stress how important that is, because too often you see these processes rolled into a new authority or into a different area and lost, and we all suffer from that. We need to make sure that what we have learned is indeed learned and not forgotten about in five or 10 years when we may have other issues arise that are unexpected. As I said at the outset, these materials were used since the 70s, so they were not a fad. These were things that had been there and had not posed a problem until they did. We could still have some issues like that coming up.

 Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (16:02): I will start off by just acquitting one of the concerns raised. Cladding Safety Victoria has documented its findings and processes to assist in any future cladding rectification programs. Documents such as Minister’s Guideline 15 and the Cladding Risk Mitigation Framework, which provide an approach to consistently and systematically addressing the risks posed by combustible cladding on class 2 and class 3 buildings, will remain publicly available to use on relevant buildings. There is more I will say on that, but it is just to say that we are respecting, yes, that there needs to be a continuation of publicly available information, in light of how extensive and serious these matters have been, which led in the first place to the time-bound – and I will emphasize that – Cladding Safety Victoria (CSV). What has been well transacted, for good reason, in the chamber today is what the triggers were that led ultimately to the establishment of Cladding Safety Victoria – namely, the combustible cladding related fires, which had indeed catastrophic consequences, the 2014 fire at the Lacrosse apartment building in Melbourne and the Grenfell Tower fire in London.

I know when I was apartment shopping – I should say, when I was moving from being a renter to an owner, which was not so long ago – the thoughts in my head, being the consumer, were about cladding: ‘Had cladding rectification works been undertaken or factored in appropriately? Were they high risk or otherwise?’ I do live in a high-rise tower, but you do not need to live in a high-rise tower to have empathy for fellow Victorians. Of course a fire can happen anywhere. It can be in a one-storey home, so let me put that caveat. Nevertheless, the impacts can be exponential when you have flammable or combustible cladding that has not been attended to. But of course the Victorian government very much tackled the problem head-on with the establishment of the Victorian Cladding Taskforce to examine the rather substantial extent of noncompliant external wall cladding on buildings throughout Victoria.

I would say, though, with that caveat, it was time-bound, because there are very specific purposes. One of them, obviously, is rectification matters, noting that this is not a practice that anyone would want to see or would want to allow into the future, and hence a curtailment of that practice certainly should be or would be understood to be an inherent part of this whole implementation in terms of the taskforce’s work.

I should say that the recommendations of the taskforce led to the Victorian government committing initial funding packages totalling $600 million to establish a private residential cladding rectification program and $150 million to complete the statewide cladding audit and government buildings cladding rectification program. That was back in July 2019. The cladding rectification levy, a subcomponent of the building permit levy (BPL), was introduced to provide 50 per cent of the $600 million CRP funding. I am just going to come back to that original point. For good purpose, CSV was established in 2020 as a time-bound agency to oversee the CRP and the GBCRP and work closely with building owners to rectify the high-risk cladding on class 2 private, residential and government-owned buildings to make these buildings safer for Victorians – because obviously, fundamentally, we are talking about people’s homes and often their life savings or a substantial amount of their life savings and of course safety, at the end of the day.

In terms of what has transpired with Cladding Safety Victoria, I will say that at the conclusion of the program CSV will have rectified around 450 private residential apartment buildings – I know there were concerns raised about clarity regarding exactly what Cladding Safety Victoria has acquitted; assessed over 21,000 buildings for cladding risk – I am not making these statements in any way to make it seem like this is a grand gesture or otherwise, but it has been a very methodical and diligent approach because it is about the safety of Victorians; worked with government to improve the safety of users of 133 government buildings; funded remediation works; and produced cladding risk information for more than 80,000 privately owned apartments. The point of listing those elements is to appreciate the extent of the work that has been undertaken, noting the sheer seriousness of the matters at hand. I will also say that with the repeal of the cladding rectification levy component of the building permit levy, this bill will introduce a new lower levy component to be applied to building work carried out on class 2 to 8 buildings in non-regional Victoria with a cost of building work of $1.5 million or more on or before 30 June 2029. There are a number of other elements to this bill, I should say, but when we are talking about the levy component and the sustainability component, it will make technical amendments to the Building Act 1993 to provide clarity for the operation of the BPL.

I can also provide some further clarity about Cladding Safety Victoria and matters acquitted. As of 28 February, 442 of the 448 private residential buildings approved for rectification works funding had been completed. The remaining six buildings are in the construction phase. Two further private residential buildings have been addressed, without any cladding works required. There is no smoke or mirrors around that. That is just numbers and facts. But at the end of the day, fundamentally it is about people’s homes, just to be very clear about the matters that have been transacted for all the right reasons.

Now I want to speak a little bit about where this is headed. We know that with the transition of the CSV to the VBA, the knowledge and information base at CSV – I am coming back to the point that I made from the outset, because I understand the importance of making sure that none of that knowledge is lost, noting that in any organisation you will have people who will maybe take other jobs or do other things in any case. So having sustainability or a continuum, if you like, of that important information is very important.

As part of the transition from CSV to the VBA, the knowledge and information base that CSV has built over six years of operation – I am thinking of the thousands of investigations that have taken place – will be transferred and managed appropriately. This is to ensure knowledge remains available to local councils, building practitioners and Victorians in the community. I did hear that concern, but to be absolutely clear, there is very good reason to sustain the availability and accessibility of that information. Clear messages regarding any potential questions arising after CSV’s closure will be made available. Certainly there is absolutely good intent, and not only good intent but clear action that has transpired as a result of the taskforce’s important work on this really serious subject matter. Therefore there is absolutely a built-in, if you like, continuum that has been anticipated, quite rightly and with goodwill, but also from a practical point of view, because there is no need to reinvent the wheel when the knowledge is already there, in anticipation of the time-bound element of Cladding Safety Victoria transitioning.

We know that we will be discussing the new Building and Plumbing Administration and Enforcement Bill 2026 this week, so we do not want to pre-empt that bill until it has actually passed, except to say that there are a number of stages that are being very importantly implemented for the benefit and the safety of Victorians and their homes. And yes, I know – sometimes I get online and some people say, ‘Is an apartment a home?’ I am going to say now an apartment is a home. I am just going on a little tangent there, because they will have a go at you and they will say, ‘An apartment is not a home. The only type of home is a freestanding property with a garden et cetera.’ I live in an apartment, and that is my home. It is nice and cosy, and I have plenty of lovely neighbours who also do, because, further to a point that was raised, living in the City of Melbourne, I would say the overwhelming majority of the homes there are apartments, and therefore it is just as much a home, whether it has a huge, big backyard or otherwise. But anyway, coming back to the point of the bill, it is really about a continuum of keeping Victorians safe.

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (16:12): We have heard today a lot about the purpose of this bill, so I will not repeat too much of that, but the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 is to abolish Cladding Safety Victoria (CSV) and the board on the grounds that the government says that the cladding rectification program has concluded in Victoria and then transfer those functions to the Building and Plumbing Commission. We know there is more legislation coming up to specifically deal with that tomorrow, but I will just make all my comments today, rather than speaking to two separate bills which deal with similar issues.

The Building and Plumbing Administration and Enforcement Bill 2026 is the one that is coming tomorrow, and we understand that will set up the framework to undertake compliance and monitoring and enforcement of building legislation, disciplinary and remedial action, something that is very much a concern to my constituents in particular, because we have so many issues that come across my desk. I cannot tell you how many issues come across my desk of rectification and defects that are happening, particularly in big apartment buildings, which then the owners corporations and the owners – my residents – have to deal with. It is awful, and it has meant that we have so many people wanting to leave the city, wanting to leave their apartments, because of not just the financial burden of dealing with defects but the emotional burden, the toll and the number of hours you have to volunteer on the owners corp committees to deal with defects. It is quite extraordinary and not something that anyone should have to deal with because of a defect that was not their fault.

I very much look forward to seeing how this is going to work, but I note that we will wait to see how well it is resourced and how the new framework will be rolled out to see whether it does actually improve things, because there have been a number of actions the government has tried to take to improve things, particularly for the residents that I talked about, but things are still bad. Things are still not working in many cases.

In terms of flammable cladding specifically, I note that CSV did announce in February:

The job is nearly done, with 95% of the program now completed. This is more than 1,550 residential buildings and tens of thousands of Victorians now safer from the risk of combustible cladding thanks to our program.

We have had some briefings from the minister’s office on this issue, so I appreciate that. Thank you for those briefings, particularly with my upper house colleague Mr Puglielli. They have assured us the work really has finished, barring a few ongoing cases that need to be wrapped up – I very much hope that is the case – and they assured us that the work can continue as that work is transferred, even if CSV shuts down. We have only had two weeks to look at this matter, though, and it is something that is really of huge concern to my electorate, because the majority of the buildings that had flammable cladding were in my electorate. So we are doing some more work to talk to our constituents who have contacted us over the last few years with cladding issues to talk to them about how it has gone, whether there are still outstanding issues and the kind of impact that it has had on them. We will bring those to the minister’s office and continue to talk with all of those constituents, and I very much encourage anyone in my electorate to reach out to me to talk to me about that so that we can follow up to make sure that this is actually working as intended.

Many people in this place talked about the Lacrosse fire of 2014, but not many people in this place were actually here when that happened – but I was. 2014 was the year that I was elected, and of course the Lacrosse building is in Docklands, which is in my electorate. That was a real flashpoint, and it was shocking. It was incredibly distressing for those residents. Very fortunately, nobody was killed and everybody was able to be evacuated, but not enough action happened quickly, because it took another three years. That was in 2014, and it took another three years, until the awful, devastating 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, for the world to start paying attention and this government to start paying attention to the issue of flammable cladding and just how dangerous it is for people. Of course we all remember the Grenfell Tower fire in that public housing building – a housing estate. It was one of the deadliest structural fires in London’s history. 72 people lost their lives and dozens more were injured, and it devastated an entire community. It really was a horrific tragedy that forced governments around the world to finally confront the dangers of flammable cladding on buildings, particularly high-rise buildings, and to wake up and figure out what they were going to do about it.

In 2014 the state government did not take much action. After 2017 the state government still did not take much action. It actually took until 2020, six years after Lacrosse and three years after Grenfell – I think we have had a bit of rewriting of history on the government side of the chamber, but this was my electorate, so I lived through this – for the government to establish Cladding Safety Victoria to conduct this large-scale audit across the state. Where cladding was found to be noncompliant or dangerous, those notices were issued to owners corporations and building owners requiring rectification. It took a long time, with my residents pushing, my constituents pushing and my upper house colleague Samantha Ratnam, who was in the other place at the time, and me pushing so hard to get the government to recognise this as an issue and then actually stump up the money to help people actually replace their cladding. I am very thankful that the government did realise that that was something that was really a government responsibility in the end and that they did stump up the money so that people were not left high and dry. That was a huge relief to so many of my constituents, because imagine what the alternative would have been. There was huge uncertainty, a huge amount of risks for constituents, and it was no fault of their own. These were people who bought into apartments I think very reasonably believing that the government would have set rules and regulations to ensure that those buildings were built in a way that was safe for human habitation. It was a failure of government regulation that this flammable cladding was allowed to be imported and then was allowed to be installed on buildings. It was not a failure of the individual owners; it was not people taking risks knowing what the risks were. These were people who I think very reasonably thought just at a bare minimum the role of government should be to set rules and regulations to keep people basically safe in their homes and make sure that the material their homes are made out of is not going to kill them.

It was a failure of government regulation. I do not know why; perhaps there were some cowboy operators bringing in materials illegally. But I think more often than not what had happened was there was no regulation, there was a lack of regulation, the regulation was too lax or there was a blind eye turned to cheaper materials being imported which were then putting people’s lives at risk.

It really was a failure of government regulation, and that is the root of the problem here, around the rules of what types of cladding could be imported and used. It was ordinary residents who were really left with the risk and left with that incredible uncertainty and the dangers of living in these buildings. It did take quite a while for the government to really recognise that was a government responsibility. I am glad that that is what happened in the end, and I am glad to see that CSV has had so much success.

I did hear back from a few residents over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might share some of their stories, just to highlight some of the issues that still remain. In one case in my electorate, for example, only 45 per cent of the cladding on the building was scheduled to be removed. The other 55 per cent, for some reason, did not need to be removed, according to CSV, and those owners really felt like they were quite stuck in limbo because they did not really have any independent guidance to help them navigate these decisions. They were very highly technical decisions that affected their homes and their safety but also their financial security. They did not really know whether to trust that this was the right amount to be removed or not, and that placed a lot of burden on them. Other owners highlighted to me the deep unfairness they felt at having to pay increased owners corporation (OC) fees under the levy while the groups responsible for the crisis – such as designers, planners, builders, asset managers and auditors – they feel, basically got away scot-free. They felt like many of these same companies actually ended up being employed with government funds to fix the crisis that they felt that they had created. One owner told me that they have already spent $2.5 million on cladding-related issues already. There were a number of charges and things that owners corporation still had to pay for. Over and above just the cladding, owners corporations still had to pay for a lot of other rectification works or pre works and things like that. I will read out the email this resident sent me, because I think it is important. They say:

[QUOTE AWAITING VERIFICATION]

We have engaged independent fire engineers to do tests, and the report showed that we are high risk in our building. However, CSV sponsored a couple of our tests last year and deemed our cladding issues were low risk.

So there were conflicting fire reports and risk reports there.

But CSV would not issue reports signed off by a fire engineer. So we have nothing to produce to the city council to remove our building notice, and CSV is about to cease operation, so there will be no more funding. So we are now completely left in the dark by the government, not knowing how safe our building is and where to go from here, and the spending on cladding issues has broke the OC. We have almost a thousand units in the complex, and every owner is suffering from this change of policy by the government.

We might see more of these stories coming through, and of course I will pass them on to the minister’s office to see if we can get to the bottom of some of these. But we still know quite over and above flammable cladding issues that there are still so many issues related to the laws that govern people who live in apartments, particularly the owners corporation laws – so many. If I go through my inbox, in terms of residents who live in the CBD, by far the most common issues that they bring to me are issues with owners corporations and high-rise living. It is everything from costs to difficulty of dealing with building defects, which is a huge one, but there are a litany of other issues – I have raised them in this place many times. There is the difficulty of getting apartment buildings off gas, for example. I have got a whole host of buildings, particularly in places like North Melbourne, that want to get off gas and are happy to pay to get off gas but just cannot do it. It is just technically very, very difficult to do that. There are rules not being fit for purpose – very restrictive rules about what people can do in their apartments. There are developer kickbacks to owners corporation management companies or for maintenance. There are commissions charged on insurance. There is lack of training for owners corporation managers – just the sheer amount of time that people have to put into being volunteer owners corporate on the owners corporation committee. There are just a whole host of issues. We had a public forum about it that just so many people attended at the end of last year. There is so much interest in fixing these issues, and I will continue to raise those with the government and with the minister as well, because they have been ignored for far too long.

Governments, including this government, want more people to live in apartments, and that is a good thing. We want more people to live in apartments. The government is doing a lot to encourage people to live in apartments, but then the laws that govern people’s lives once they do live in apartments are so outdated and terrible that they end up significantly impacting people’s lives, and they desperately need fixing. We are also still waiting for the government to act on the OC review. That has been years and years in the making. We are still waiting for the government to come and tell us what will actually happen. We have had so many residents engage in good faith in that process to talk about what needs to happen when it comes to the OC laws, and really it has been radio silence.

I very much urge the government to act quickly to make sure that for not just the people who live in apartments now but the thousands more people that the government is wanting to live in apartments these laws are much better than what we have now. I want to thank all of the constituents who have passed on their concerns to me. There have been hundreds and hundreds of them over the years, and please know that I will be continuing to follow up every single case with the government, because people who live in apartments are people too and they have not had as much attention as they should have.

 Paul MERCURIO (Hastings) (16:26): I rise in support of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. This bill does three things: it formally repeals the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020 and winds down Cladding Safety Victoria as an agency, it repeals the cladding rectification levy and it adjusts the building permit levy to fund the Building and Plumbing Commission’s ongoing consumer protection work. This is a good day, not because we are repealing something but because of what that repeal represents. It represents a job done, a promise kept, a government that said it would protect Victorians from the dangers of combustible cladding and then went out and actually did it – maybe not to the timeframe that the member for Melbourne was really wanting, but we did it, we achieved it. Cladding Safety Victoria was always designed to be a time-limited agency. It had a clear goal: find the buildings putting Victorians at risk, fix them and make sure the cost of that does not fall on the people living in them. That is exactly what happened, and now, with the work substantially complete, it is time to wind it down. This bill does that cleanly and responsibly.

Before I get into the detail I would just like to take a moment to acknowledge the people who made this possible: Rod Fehring, Sarah Clarke and the entire CSV board, CEO Dan O’Brien and every single person on that team. They took on an enormous, complex task. They built a methodology that has been shared around the world, and they protected hundreds of thousands of Victorians who without this program would have been left to face that burden on their own – and that matters. So thank you to those people.

Let me briefly take the house back to where this started. In November 2014 the Lacrosse tower in Melbourne’s Docklands caught fire. I still remember seeing the footage on the television, and I was somewhat surprised and appalled that a building could catch fire on the outside. Noncompliant aluminium composite cladding ignited by a cigarette spread flames up 13 storeys. People could see it from the other side of the city, and luckily no-one died. But it was a warning, and the Victorian Building Authority audit that followed found that more than half of building permits inspected did not comply with cladding regulations. More than half: that was not a rounding error; that was a systematic failure. Then, in 2017, we watched in horror as Grenfell Tower burned in London. Tragically, 72 people died, and those deaths were preventable. That fire was the catastrophic result of noncompliant cladding, failed oversight and a system that had left residents without protection.

Victoria paid attention. The Allan Labor government established the Victorian Cladding Taskforce, committed over $600 million to the rectification program and built Cladding Safety Victoria from the ground up, and the results speak for themselves. More than 1660 buildings were identified, over 83,000 homes were made safer and 150,000 Victorians will go to sleep tonight in buildings that are genuinely safer than they were before this program began.

And it was not just for apartments. The program reached 131 public use buildings – hospitals, police stations, fire stations, TAFEs and courts – and 40 Victorian schools, with nearly 19,000 students. These are the places people trust, the places they send their kids, the places they turn to in an emergency, so CSV have made them safer also. As of 28 February this year, 442 of the 448 private residential buildings approved for rectification works funding have been completed. The remaining six buildings are in the construction phase, and two further buildings have been addressed without any cladding works needed. That is 90 per cent completed and 10 per cent well on the way, so that adds up to 100 per cent job done. A further 132 government-owned and community housing buildings have also been completed. That is not a near miss; that is a program that did what it set out to do.

I might just add here too that in the fulfilment of its functions under the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020, CSV has reviewed in detail the original plans and permits for 1000 privately owned apartment buildings. During extensive and direct engagement with impacted owners and tenants, two of the frequently asked questions have been ‘Why was combustible cladding used? and ‘Who is responsible?’ The resulting report addresses the second question with insights about more than 800 buildings where adequate information was available in designs and permits to yield a robust conclusion about the compliance of external wall cladding. The report states:

An analysis of this data reveals widespread misapplication of Victoria’s regulatory requirements for external wall cladding by the key professionals responsible for the design and permitting of buildings, namely the architects, draftspersons, fire safety engineers … and building surveyors

You can find a copy of that on the CSV website. The member for Narracan and the member for Morwell spoke about that complete issue – that they thought they were using things that had been approved. Obviously there was a lot of misinformation and misapplication that went on and, thankfully, that has been caught.

Now to the other important work that this bill does. When CSV is abolished, its functions, assets, staff and liabilities transfer to the Building and Plumbing Commission. The BPC is a consumer-facing building regulator to be established by this government to hold dodgy operators accountable and give working Victorians genuine protection when things go wrong. The cladding expertise that CSV has built over six years does not disappear, it carries over. The bill also makes significant changes to the building levy structure, and I want to be clear about what that means in practice. The cladding rectification levy is repealed. It was created to fund half the cost of rectification works. That work is done, and the levy is no longer needed. In its place, a new, lower component of the building permit levy is introduced. This applies only to class 2 to 8 buildings in non-metropolitan areas valued at $1.5 million or more and only until June 2029. The net effect: an overall reduction in levy costs of between 47 and 66 per cent. Those savings should flow through to builders and to consumers.

Buying a home is the biggest financial decision most working people will ever make – we know that – and every dollar of unnecessary cost we can remove from that process is a dollar back in someone’s pocket. This sits alongside the broader work the Allan Labor government is doing to make the building system work for Victorians, not against them. The BPC has tough powers to stop occupancy permits being issued on buildings with serious defects. If it is not fixed, it is not for sale, and soon rectification order powers will force builders back to address seriously defective work, even after move-in day. The first-resort domestic building warranty means homebuyers can make a claim when a problem is first identified, not just when the builder has gone under. The developer bond scheme gives buyers of high-rise buildings a financial safety net that simply did not exist before. These are not abstract reforms; they are the difference between a working family losing tens of thousands of dollars chasing a dodgy operator through VCAT and having a regulator with the power and resources to step in and hold that operator to account.

I will say this plainly: there are members on the other side of this chamber who have stood up and spoken at length about the suffering of Victorians caught out by dodgy builders. They have shared real stories – some have shared their own stories – and yet, when the time came to back the reforms that would actually fix the problem, they opposed them, and that is a choice. Victorians remember those choices. Labor answers to working people. That is why we built CSV, that is why we are building the BPC and that is why we are getting on with constructing more homes with more protections to better standards. In the 12 months to January this year Victoria approved nearly 53,000 dwellings, commenced over 55,000 and completed over 54,000, more than New South Wales and more than Queensland. We are not just building more, we are building better. We said we would fix the cladding crisis. We funded it, we built the agency, we ran the program and we protected 157,000 Victorians in the process. Now we are winding it down responsibly, locking in the savings and making sure the BPC has what it needs to keep protecting consumers for years to come. I commend the bill to the house.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Lauren Kathage): I acknowledge in the gallery Ryan Smith, former member for Warrandyte and former Minister for Environment and Climate Change and Minister for Youth Affairs.

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (16:36): Much to the disappointment of my two colleagues in the chamber, I have arrived on time to speak, so it has saved me a slab of beer. I rise to speak on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. In going to this, one of the previous speakers I heard talked about Ted Baillieu’s role in this initially, and can I commend Ted for what he did as a Premier and as an architect for the thoughts that he put through and a lot of the things that he did when we were in government. It was his architect’s mind that was thinking about this when we got involved in that particular issue after the fire in London and making sure that Victoria was safe. I think we all watched the horror of that fire in London and what happened there and the tragedy it was. All of us collectively, and Ted as a former Premier, wanted to make sure that we did not actually have that in Victoria here. We can argue about the legislation and we can argue about how effective it was, but we have been very fortunate that we actually have not had one of those fires here in Victoria. Now that the majority of that cladding has been removed, there is some debate, particularly from smaller builders, who say that when they used that cladding it was approved and they were working within the rules of the government of the day in using that particular cladding. They found it difficult as smaller builders that they had to then find the money to actually have it taken off and different cladding put on. Their view was that if they did something that was within the government rules and the government has now found it is not safe, why wasn’t the government helping them more in actually covering the cost of changing that?

It has been difficult for a lot of body corporates, and a lot of buildings have had to raise the money to change their cladding, but it is now overwhelmingly done. As I understand the statistics, 81 per cent of the program has been completed, 409 high-risk buildings in that program have been completed and something like 275,000 square metres of cladding has been removed. As our lead speaker talked about, that would cover the MCG playing field 13.5 times, so a huge area has been taken off buildings. It was quite a logistical job, and as I said, it covered quite a significant area. A number of government buildings had to be remediated as well through that particular process, and 80,000 private apartments were supported in going through that issue and 133 government buildings were made safer. As all the other previous speakers have talked about, it is time now to wind this particular piece of legislation up and roll it into other legislation.

While we are talking about building and the opportunities for Victoria, I know in my electorate – and I can speak probably for most country electorates – we are all desperate for more housing. When businesses try and attract people to come to our communities to fill the jobs that are there that need to be filled, whether they be professional people from the medical profession, lawyers or accountant, right down to people that do any job in the community, one of the challenges they have when they come to regional Victoria is actually finding a house.

I know that is an issue in Melbourne. Some of my family moved out of a flat that they were not happy with and now have found it very, very hard to get back into a flat here in Melbourne. I think for all the younger people in Melbourne who are looking to rent flats it is really challenging to find accommodation in Melbourne as well. I think some of that comes back to the fact that the current government has changed the balance of power between the investor who owns a rental property to rent it out and the tenants who want to rent that property and live in it. Renters have rights and should have rights, but so do landlords, and they should have rights to protect their asset as well. I think that the balance has gone too far.

I am seeing people in my electorate who own rental properties selling Victorian rental properties and buying rental properties across the river in New South Wales or going to South Australia to buy rental properties because they believe they will get a better return on their investment and have more control over the property – about who can go in it, what they can do with it and how they can actually manage that property and make sure their asset is protected into the future. A word of caution – I know there are some new rules coming in today around rental forms and how you apply for a flat, but my observation, from talking to people who are looking to get a flat and talking to people who have owned rental properties, is that there has been an exit from owning rental properties here in Victoria to other forms of investment or to other states to own rental properties, and I think that is to the detriment of us as a society.

Everyone starts out in life renting a property. Most people do not have the luxury of being able to buy a property straight off. Most people do not have the luxury of having parents who can help them buy a property. Most people start off with a flat. When they are from the country and they move to Melbourne to go to uni or get a job, they get a flat. They build up their reserves. They might buy a flat. They might then trade up to a house at some stage. But at the moment, getting that first step on the ladder to get a rental property is a real challenge. To get the next step to actually own a property is a real challenge.

One of the numbers that I have quoted quite often from the Housing Industry Association is that more than 40 per cent of the cost of a house and land package in Victoria is state government charges, taxes and fees and red tape, green tape and black tape that has to be met to build that particular property. If we want to solve the housing issue, we need to make sure that we can reduce that amount of red, green and black tape in this state for builders who want to build a house, and we need to take the government’s hand out of the pocket of everyone who wants to build a house. My philosophy on life is that the government is there to make sure that people do the right thing, but after that it should get out of the way and let private enterprise do what it does best, and that is run businesses and build houses. When any government – it does not matter what side or what colour of government it is – gets too involved in the market, they generally make a mess of it.

I think, collectively, the current government have made a mess of the supply of rental properties because they have changed the rules so much, and they are also making it very expensive for house and land packages because of all the taxes and charges that are on those. If you could reduce a house and land package – cut the taxes in half and take it back to 20 per cent – that would have a huge impact on the price of a house and people’s ability to get into one. I know our side of politics has made some commitments around the next election to reducing some of those taxes. That is necessary if we are going to solve the housing issues of this state. We do not want to see just more acres and acres of houses out in the regional areas on the outskirts of Melbourne. I agree that some sensible densification is the way that we do have to go. I know there are debates from our metropolitan MPs as to where that should and should not be, and I will stay right out of that.

A member interjected.

Peter WALSH: Well, I think your electorate is a perfect spot for densification. We really need a fast train to Ballarat. Huge high-rise buildings in Ballarat would be just the way to go. I look forward to you announcing that as a policy. Sorry, through the Chair – I look forward to that being announced at the next election. Sensible densification – but most importantly, get the government’s hand out of the pocket of the people who actually invest, who buy the property and who do all the work to do the subdivision and put the roads, the drainage, the sewerage and everything in.

It costs a lot of money to do a subdivision. Stop taxing them so much, and speed the process up. I have talked about it a lot previously because it is now getting houses on it, but C117 was a huge subdivision of 5000 lots to the west side of Echuca. That took six years from concept to actually having final approval of a precinct structure plan. That just cost far too much money for the holding costs for that particular project. There has to be a way of getting these things done faster. I know the government has streamlined some of the processes, but, talking to the people who are doing subdivisions in regional Victoria, it still takes a long time. I was talking to a group in Kyabram on Monday who are doing a small lot for pensioners to live in, and they were told no matter what they do, it was going to take at least 12 months to get through the planning process with local government. That is far too slow. The land is there, some designs are done and there is a philanthropist who is prepared to invest in it to build low-cost housing for pensioners. Why can’t it be done faster? The question that was asked of me was: why does it take so long? I do not know the answer to that, but I would love someone to tell me.

 Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (16:46): At the outset, I reckon that the member for Wendouree is pretty proud of the massive upgrade of Wendouree station that enables residents of Lucas and Delacombe to get down to Melbourne on 20-minute services at peak times and in 40 minutes the rest of the day, which is about infrastructure coming together to support housing.

The Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 has been an interesting debate, and it has thrown up some interesting I think philosophical counterpoints between the parties on different sides of the house. I will take exception to the Greens political party leader’s contribution in due course. But I was interested in the contribution of the member for Murray Plains’ contribution and his reflection about the role of government. I would contend that the very bill that we are discussing here, the entity that it seeks to unwind and disestablish in effect, is an act of really substantive and effective government intervention in a market that had failed. To suggest that government should excuse itself, exclude itself, recuse itself, whatever the right word is, from the housing market in that sense puts people’s lives at risk.

Cladding Safety Victoria and the steps that took place in this state in the years between 2014, when the Lacrosse fire took place in Docklands and particularly after Grenfell in 2017, and the establishment of CSV in 2020 all represent a really important intervention in a failed market, and failing to have made that intervention would have left Victorians at acute risk, fundamentally, let us be honest, of burning alive and dying of smoke inhalation in their own homes, which is what happened, tragically, to at least 72 people in Grenfell Tower, in Kensington in west London, in June 2017. The response to the Grenfell fire of the UK Tory government after 2017, which was a bit distracted, I suspect, at the time by an election and various other things, or the lack of a coherent response to that fire, contrasts really visibly and starkly with this government’s response through the establishment of CSV and through the work that took place in the years leading up to it.

In repealing Cladding Safety Victoria this bill – I think the member for Hastings put it well – reflects the successful completion of its work, and it was I think a genuinely innovative and effective public policy response, grounded in a comprehensive analysis and understanding of both data and risk and delivering upon CSV’s mission, which was about keeping Victorians safe, and I think it did that. It maintained confidence simultaneously in the construction sector and regulation and I think sits in pretty stark contrast with the approach of those opposite. I think it is a program that Victorians should be proud of. It was established before my time in this place, but looking at its track record and its effective record of delivery, it is certainly something I am proud of and I think it is something that Parliament should be proud of. It has kept over 150,000 Victorians safe in their homes. It has protected them from debilitating debts which have accrued to those who are left to grapple with issues that have occurred that are no fault of theirs, that are the failure of buildings and of regulation, which have led to flammable building materials being used in their construction.

We have seen this in other forms of construction as well. It is particularly insidious in the high-rise sector – the Opal Tower in western Sydney and the issues with concrete and the structural engineering of that building.

It has a real knock-on effect for people’s confidence to buy into higher-density forms of housing and also keeps people locked into properties without the capacity to sell them on. That is something which has been particularly challenging in the UK. By the time it is wound down as a consequence of this bill, CSV will have made over 1600 buildings safe and, as I say, protected hundreds of thousands of Victorians both from real physical harm and indeed death but also from debilitating debts.

The background to CSV’s establishment has been pretty well traversed by a number of speeches and contributions to this debate, but I do really come back to that point about Grenfell and the divergent policy approaches that followed that fire in the UK and the lack of coordinated action on behalf of the UK Tory government contrasted with the approach that this government, the Andrews government at the time, took in the aftermath of Grenfell in particular, which I think really emphasised to people on a very tangible, real scale the risks of not grappling with flammable cladding. I do again emphasise that in the lead-up to the establishment of Cladding Safety Victoria the use of high-risk combustible cladding had already been restricted and was effectively banned on new buildings. Enforcement powers had already been increased, allowing authorities to carry out more inspections to issue emergency orders and to take disciplinary action against non-compliant builders, skewering the argument of the Greens political party that somehow the establishment of Cladding Safety Victoria in 2020 was the first response to either Grenfell or the Lacrosse fire in 2014. But this government also committed very substantial funding – around $600 million – to support the removal and replacement of high-risk cladding, particularly on residential buildings. In effect, that created risk pooling – a form of post-hoc insurance, if you like – reflecting the fact that those costs are catastrophic to an individual who happens to be in a tower that is affected but we all stand to benefit if there is confidence in the construction sector, confidence in housing and effective regulation of all of those dimensions.

The Grenfell Tower fire began in a fourth-floor flat then flew up the outside of that building in really graphic ways that I think everyone can recall. It exhibited an array of really core public policy failures. Firstly, there were regulatory gaps and fragmentation that led to those combustible materials still being used after their risks were well, well known. There had been cost cutting, outsourcing pressures and delivery of public housing, and housing more broadly, that was not properly supported by stringent regulatory standards and safeguards – the kinds of, I suspect, government intervention that others have suggested should not be taking place. But if it does not take place, you have catastrophes like that, so there is a need, I think, for government – as this government has done – to keep people safe, to keep Victorians safe, to keep them alive and in their own homes. In the context of Grenfell, though, where the Victorian approach was to have a systematic review of where the risky buildings were and then to work through that risk in a systematic way to address the high-risk buildings first to ensure that cladding was removed, to target the investment where it was most needed and then to work through the tail of that risk, as it were, the UK response in effect did not adequately address the needs of either vulnerable populations or the enduring presence of cladding. It was not only the fact that Grenfell Tower itself remained as a stark, burnt-out silhouette on the sky of west London near Westfield shopping centre – and I figure it is a part of Notting Hill that they do not show you in the film – but it was that buildings like it were not properly rectified. It was left to the owners of those buildings, the social housing trusts and the tenants to undertake their own rectification, absent proper intervention and support from central government or indeed local housing authorities. The culmination of all of that is that not only did public confidence in that form of housing decline precipitously after 2017 but there was a broad-based decline in trust in government and government institutions, which I think manifests itself in many different ways. One of those ways is in the attraction of populist parties, extremist parties, which can proffer simplistic solutions in the absence of a coordinated and effective response, which should be the core business of government.

If you have that erosion of trust in public institutions, then it manifests, as I said, in an array of challenging ways across society and undermines institutional and governmental legitimacy as well. I think there are clear policy lessons in the approach that Victoria took in the establishment and the funding and the action of CSV in seeking to address the most high risk buildings, and then that tail of risk, so that Victorians, 150,000 of them, can be kept safe but also so that there is more broad-based confidence in the construction sector in that form of higher density living, contrasted with the UK approach, which has failed to grapple with not just the presence of high-risk cladding but the broader undermining of trust and confidence in the construction sector, in housing, and in the governments, which should be standing up for people who live in those buildings.

 John PESUTTO (Hawthorn) (16:56): I am pleased to be able to rise and speak on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 and join my colleagues in saying that we will not be opposing this bill and for the most part we can see the sense in winding up the activities of a body that has accomplished most of its objectives and rolling it into the Building and Plumbing Commission. In commencing my remarks I do want to acknowledge the work of the building cladding taskforce and the involvement in a very substantial way of my predecessor in the seat of Hawthorn the former Premier Ted Baillieu, who was well known for his architectural prowess and insights and passion for this particular project when he was appointed to that taskforce. We know that in terms of its work it has made a substantial number of properties safer. We do not have conclusive assurances that all risks have been identified and eliminated, but as I have said, for the most part we are quite pleased to see these functions rolled into BPC, although, as previous speakers have pointed out, there are a number of tasks and responsibilities the government will have to meet. I do not want to rehearse those particular points that have been made by the previous speakers. I want to use this opportunity to use what has happened here off the back of the Lacrosse and Grenfell disasters – particularly the Grenfell disaster – and to use that as a case study in some of the proposals this government is pursuing against a range of advisory insights, which would point to some of the dangers which could be repeated in the future in different ways. I will come to those in a moment.

As previous speakers have pointed out, builders, owners and tenants in properties were living in buildings with flammable cladding in an environment where this particular building product was legal, and legal for some time, when it was known that there were risks of this cladding being flammable. It is in the context of that that I want to caution the government to use this as an occasion to think about how it is proceeding, particularly in relation to its housing and planning policies.

The first thing I want to note in a ranging over a few examples is the building better apartments design guidelines. As the government has pointed out, its argument is that by 2050 it will see more than 2 million new homes constructed. It announced this policy in 2023, and there have been a series of iterations since then. It has always intrigued me that the government was so adamant about its housing targets and about its activity centres but had not yet developed to full maturity all of the new guidelines that were in place to ensure that the built form, the setbacks, the bedroom sizes, sunlight into buildings and natural light were being addressed, if you were to see hundreds of thousands of new dwellings, many of which, under the government’s conception of its housing policy, would be in high-density, high-rise contexts.

I think it defies reason and logic that you would race forward without having done that work on ensuring that the new stock that comes to market – that is, the new supply – would actually meet those standards that we would expect. I use that in the context of this because if you race ahead without consideration of the risks that could materialise, people will suffer in one way or another in the future. That is the first example I wanted to cite.

The second one is owners corporation reform, and I know the member for Melbourne mentioned this too. I have spoken about this in the Parliament before. I think the government is racing ahead with proposals to shoehorn into communities, regardless of amenity and character and livability, hundreds of thousands of new dwellings, despite the lack of the infrastructure needed to support them, and it has not ensured that the rights of owner-occupiers and renters in those buildings can be properly protected. The government would have to admit that it has not even completed its own review into owners corporation reform. Again, it is another example of a government racing ahead with known risks. We know that owner-occupiers in these high-density, multiapartment complexes are struggling in a range of ways, whether it is pursuing third parties when they cannot secure quorum or when they have irreconcilable differences on an owners corporation. That is a real problem if you are going to see millions of Victorians living in these contexts in the future. Owners corporation reform should have preceded the government’s housing statement, not succeeded it. So that is another risk.

A third risk I want to identify is in relation to prefabricated homes, modular homes and 3D printing, which is increasingly being used – it is not at scale, but it is increasingly coming online. I say this because, in the same way that there was just a complacency around flammable cladding, we need to ensure that as innovation takes us into increasingly an era of prefabricated homes, modular designs and construction and 3D printing – which I wholeheartedly support. I have said this publicly and I have said it in here. I think this is a key to delivering housing in a more affordable way, because these types of newer homes can be delivered 20 to 30 per cent cheaper than a conventionally built home. Banks like the Commonwealth Bank are now rearranging their credit lending policies to make it easier for people to secure the finance they need to pay the firms providing prefabricated homes in a way that they could not before. The Commonwealth Bank is one institution that is leading that. But like the other matters I have mentioned – owners corporation reform and apartment guidelines and designs – it makes sense that you would be studying the risks of this in the same way that we saw with flammable cladding.

The fourth risk I want to identify is some of the integrity risk around the development facilitation program, and similar programs the government has, to completely bypass communities and local municipal authorities and to be able to ram through and impose on communities developments that may not be suited to an area. It affects everybody in this chamber, including those opposite, many of whom I note have been quite vocal in their opposition to high-density proposals in their own seats. It is a risk that we should be alive to, because we are missing the checks and balances, the oversight, the third-party review and the brakes on ministerial authority and executive authority to usher through proposals behind closed doors under the DFP, which creates its own set of risks. If you are going to be developing a policy that will allow such a substantial number of new dwellings in the form of high-rise, high-density buildings in communities that are not being supported with the infrastructure needed to develop them, that creates a substantial amount of risk in the system.

With these four examples, what I am pointing out to the government is that we need to learn the lessons of the flammable cladding experience. We cannot change the past, and a lot of good work has been done since – I am happy to acknowledge that – but we should always be learning from these previous experiences. And there are risks in the government’s approach with its housing policy here – risks that you will end up with poor design and risks that you will end up with owner-occupiers and renters who have limited rights or rights that are not practically available for them to exercise. We will have situations where we have allowed new stock to come to market with prefabricated, modular materials that the government has failed in its regulatory role to oversee in the interests of consumers and owner-occupiers.

That leads me to my final point on the back of this, which is the elimination of local community voices. On this side of the house, we have made it very clear that we will restore community voices in the development and delivery of more housing in our communities. But this bill, which we do not oppose, is a good case study and should be a real lesson for a government that is proceeding without acknowledging the risks.

 Anthony CIANFLONE (Pascoe Vale) (17:06): I rise to speak on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. Of course as we continue to build more homes, it is essential we continue to lift and strengthen building standards, workmanship quality, materials and products to protect home owners, renters, tenants, builders, the community and consumers at large. Given our Victorian Labor government’s bold vision to build more homes, this will be essential in helping us to build and foster safe, sustainable and resilient communities, particularly through our respective housing strategies of Plan for Victoria; our activity centre program, including in central Coburg and Sydney Road in Brunswick; our housing statement to deliver 800,000 new homes over the coming decade; and our big housing infrastructure build as well.

This bill represents the successful conclusion of the world-first initiative set up by the Victorian government in response to cladding-related safety issues to fight for Victorian consumers by making their buildings safe from combustible cladding. The Victorian government established Cladding Safety Victoria in response to growing safety risks and public concern about flammable cladding on residential buildings. A number of high-profile fires, most notably the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK in 2017, which resulted in the deaths of 72 people in that tower, and the Lacrosse building fire in 2014 in Melbourne in Docklands, exposed how dangerous combustible cladding materials can be and how quickly they can flame up. These events showed that fires could spread rapidly on building exteriors, putting lives at risk.

Cladding is of course the outer skin of a building. When that material is combustible, it can ignite easily, burn rapidly and allow fire to travel up or across the outside of a building. The most well-known example is aluminium composite panels with a polyethylene plastic core. Other risky materials can also include certain insulation products and some decorative facade panels. Many cladding products used in Australian buildings, especially aluminium composite panels, have been sourced from overseas manufacturers. Imported products often come from Europe and Asia, driven by lower costs and large-scale global supply chains and lower standards. Industry guidance itself has even noted that Australian projects have, on some occasions, used these materials, which have since been rectified in Victoria.

This was a key factor in the cladding crisis – inconsistent standards, certification and compliance across international supply chains for materials being brought onto local residential and other projects. That is why the Victorian government continued to take action to address these dangerous cladding issues. In June 2017 the Cladding Taskforce was established and, as we have heard, it was headed by the former Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu and former Deputy Premier John Thwaites. It worked with the Victorian Building Authority to identify 15 buildings that would have their cladding fixed first, audited buildings across Victoria for combustible cladding, assessed fire safety risks and provided recommendations to government on how to respond. The taskforce ultimately laid the groundwork for major reforms, including the creation of Cladding Safety Victoria and the state’s large-scale rectification program. This was a world-first program that was designed to fix the buildings most at risk and to keep Victorians safe. And it was not just about safety – it was also about fairness for people who bought apartments in good faith and were let down by dodgy builders or these dangerous flammable building products. The taskforce also recognised that combustible cladding is a national problem and wanted the federal government, of course, to be part of this process as well, given the importation and lower standards which led to a lot of this coming into the local market.

In July 2019 the Victorian Labor government established Cladding Safety Victoria as a standalone statutory authority responsible for the rectification of buildings with high-risk cladding and the establishment of a dedicated cladding agency. It was allocated $600 million for the cladding rectification program, and the grants sought to fund that rectification work on hundreds of buildings found to have that high-risk cladding to make sure they were safe and compliant with all building regulations. $150 million was also committed to complete the statewide cladding audit and the government buildings cladding rectification program.

In February 2021 we also banned high-risk cladding products on new multistorey buildings. The then Minister for Planning Richard Wynne announced a prohibition on flammable aluminium composite panels and rendered expanded polystyrene as external wall cladding on all future multistorey developments, which still continues to this day. The decision to ban the use of these products on certain building types was based on that expert technical advice, which found they can contribute to the spread of fire when used inappropriately or installed incorrectly. It took effect from 1 Feb 2021, and the ban prohibited the use of these products on apartment buildings and other residential buildings, such as hotels and aged care facilities with two or more storeys. The ban also applied to the use of these products in office buildings, shopping centres and other retail premises, warehouses, factories and car parks with three or more storeys. Applying the ban to a new multistorey development of course would limit the potential risks, and the Victorian Building Authority was provided the responsibility of enforcing the cladding ban in its role as the building regulator, with penalties of up to $400,000 for significant breaches.

In 2022 the Victorian government also approved a further $40 million for the cladding remediation partnership program to protect a wider range of consumers from that cladding-related harm, and the program provided all in-scope buildings assessed with a lower cladding risk with the pathway for remediation. The partnership program also meant that local councils, importantly, were provided with a consistent framework to support owners of these buildings to mitigate cladding risk at the lowest cost and satisfy any enforcement notice issued by a municipal building surveyor. In December 2023 additional funding again, of $109 million, including $95 million, was approved to rectify a further tranche of buildings which had been also identified through those processes with an unacceptable cladding risk.

Over the last six years Cladding Safety Victoria has made countless Victorians safe from the dangers posed by combustible cladding. In partnership with stakeholders, including building owners, corporations and Fire Rescue Victoria, Cladding Safety Victoria has completed remediation of more than 99 per cent of the highest risk buildings in the cladding rectification program, dramatically reducing their combustible cladding risk. with the remaining buildings to be completed this year. CSV has also worked to remove the cladding risk on 130 government-owned and community buildings, including schools, hospitals and buildings of cultural significance, with three more to finish soon. The partnership program has put in place the risk mitigation pathways for 100 per cent of additional lower class 2 buildings – that is 1210 buildings – and as of 28 February 2026, 442 of the 448 private residential buildings approved for rectification works funding had been completed. The remaining six buildings are in the construction phase, and two further private residential buildings have been addressed without the need for any cladding works.

CSV has contributed significantly not just on the ground here in Victoria but also to global knowledge on combustible cladding risk and has led the way in development of evidence-based cladding risk reduction approaches. Now, with CSV’s work largely acquitted, the time for legislative reform, streamlining and embedding its resources and services into the new Building and Plumbing Commission has arrived.

The main purpose of this bill is to repeal the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020 and abolish Cladding Safety Victoria and the Cladding Safety Victoria board and confer upon the Victorian Building Authority, trading as the Building and Plumbing Commission, additional functions to enable the completion of CSV’s activities and administrative obligations; to transfer Cladding Safety Victoria’s property rights and liabilities to the BPC; to transfer Cladding Safety Victoria staff to the BPC, the Building and Plumbing Commission; to repeal the cladding rectification levy; and to introduce a new element of the building permit levy to be applied to class 2 to 8 buildings in non-regional Victoria, with costs of building works of $1.5 million or more up to and including on 30 June 2029, reducing the overall cost of the building permit levy.

At a local level I have continued to work and support residents impacted by dangerous flammable cladding. Whilst no public information is available of course on specific builds that have been rectified through the program, for obvious financial, privacy, legal, property value and safety reasons, CSV did designate, as we know, three main cladding categories in determining which to prioritise for rectification work, including those of unacceptable risk, which is the highest level of danger; elevated risk, which is moderate risk; and of course low risk, which is the lowest level of concern. What we know locally is that in Merri-bek, in my community, including Pascoe Vale, Coburg and Brunswick West, mostly apartment buildings in class 2 with elevated risk were rectified, mainly in Coburg, Brunswick and Brunswick West, and typically those built in the last 15 to 25 years were the area of focus.

Merri-bek was of course part of the cladding remediation partnership that was delivered with Cladding Safety Victoria and worked to support the risk assessments, fire safety upgrades and full cladding replacement where required.

I had a number of residents throughout the last few years approach me on different issues relating to the cladding process. I was very happy to help them. I would love to list them all and how we helped resolve their various issues in respective ways. One in particular was in April 2023. I was approached by local resident Belinda from Coburg seeking assistance. In December 2019 she was told her building would be inspected for flammable cladding. Expanded polystyrene was found on the first level and rooftop balconies, and the building was to be classed with a level of risk. They sought advice from Cladding Safety Victoria to rectify the situation and in March 2023 were informed that they were not eligible for rectification funding. I subsequently made representations to the relevant minister on Belinda’s behalf. I was informed that from a fire safety perspective each of the apartments in her block has direct street access. The building has a brick-veneer construction on the ground floor and lightweight cladding to the upper storey. Each apartment is separated by fire-rated walls. CSV would not have provided funding due to its assessment of the building having a lower risk of fire spread. She wrote me a beautiful email which basically said:

We need to install one heat detector –

as a result of their visit –

in each unit in the living room. That’s all. No expensive and drawn-out building works – just a fix that costs a few hundred dollars.

This plan has already been signed off by Merri-bek Council, so once we get it sorted, the whole ordeal will be over.

Thank you so much to you both, and to your team, for being in our corner. I doubt we would have this resolved without your help.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Paul Mercurio): I call the member for Bulleen.

Members interjecting.

 Matthew GUY (Bulleen) (17:16): Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I appreciate it.

Brad Rowswell: You’re very popular, aren’t you, member for Bulleen?

Matthew GUY: So is the member for Pascoe Vale. I enjoy the welcome. The member for Pascoe Vale is always fun to come after; he is a good speaker. I want to make some remarks about the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. Firstly, though, I am a bit perplexed because, as the member for Sandringham has shown me, the only point of government business for the whole week is this repeal bill. I would have thought that a government with an agenda, as the government say they have, would have more than one repeal bill on government business for the entire week. While I do not take away from the seriousness of this bill, and I do want to make some comments about it in depth, I would have thought that there is more to do than just one repeal bill for the government for the whole week.

When I was a minister, I had responsibility for the Victorian Building Authority, the VBA, and I noticed members from the government before my contribution saying that the BPC, the Building and Plumbing Commission, was established by this government. Well, no, it was not, unless you call establishing a commission a rebrand with a new logo at the same premise and with the same staff doing the same things, which would be quite odd. I did not establish the VBA either. In fact it was the Building Commission before it was rebranded as the Victorian Building Authority and then rebranded again as the Building and Plumbing Commission. I would hardly call establishing an authority designing a new logo, getting some decals and sticking them on the door and saying, ‘Give us a pat on the back.’

Brad Rowswell: Highly expensive.

Matthew GUY: It would be, member for Sandringham. It would be a large and expensive thing to do. Now, one thing I do want to say, noting the importance of this topic, members opposite and other members have said, ‘We’ve fixed the cladding crisis. We’re concluding it once the job is done. We’ve kept over 150,000 Victorians safe.’ This project is not concluded. It is a very serious project, it is a very important project and it is not concluded. Now what we are asking for is a regulator to be the enforcement agency for an area that is outside their current remit. I submit to you that this is not getting the job done. The 20 per cent of the buildings that are noncompliant that are not complete yet are no less important than the 80 per cent that have been done. While I do not at all criticise the government for moving on this – in fact I think Ted Baillieu and John Brumby back in 2017, from memory, gave advice to the government about what was necessary and people moved on with it, and of course they would do; it is the role of government – the concept of saying that the job is done when it is 80 per cent complete is not real. Patting yourself on the back, I think, frankly is why Victorians get frustrated and angry with government. They say, ‘You’re patting yourself on the back and you’re asking us to thank you and fawn over you’ – like they are fawning over themselves – ‘when the job is not completed.’ It is an important job at that. I mean, you are talking about hundreds of buildings – up to 400 – that are still not compliant.

I question whether rolling this authority up now is the right thing to do. I mean, why roll it up when the job is not done? Why give an enforcement responsibility to a regulatory agency whose roles and responsibilities have got nothing similar to this in terms of enforcing a national building code and then inspecting it and then testing and compliance? You know, I find that quizzical. I mean, the Victorian Building and Plumbing Commission is, as it says, the regulator for the building and plumbing industries. It says on its own website:

We combine the functions of the Victorian Building Authority (VBA), Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria (DBDRV), –

which is a small authority –

and the domestic building insurance function of the Victorian Managed Insurance Authority (VMIA) …

There is nothing wrong with that at all, but then they are throwing on top of that an important task – I would say the most important task – of completing the one in five buildings that are still non-compliant with what Cladding Safety Victoria’s specifications were said to be. It is an immensely important task, and I just do not understand why the government determined that Cladding Safety Victoria should be wound up at this point in time and rolled into a regulatory agency somewhere just before an election. I actually have not heard any excuse. I have heard a lot of pats on the back for an 80 per cent job done, but I have not heard anyone saying, ‘Well, this is why it’s being wound up now,’ when the job is not complete and one in five buildings identified have not been repaired of the cladding material that has been identified, some of which go back, as the member for Narracan said, to the 1990s. You cannot blame builders for this. Builders were putting in what was specified by the Building Code of Australia. It is not a political document – the building code is the building code – and if they met those building codes, builders could obviously use what was specified in them.

The issue of course is that we have found that a number of those cladding materials are highly flammable and thus do need to be replaced, quite obviously. We saw the spectacular fire in Southbank and the overseas examples, very sad examples – in London, for instance, where 70 people died in the Grenfell Tower – which brought to life that there is a problem and this material needs to be identified and dealt with. Quite rightly, the government of the day – I think it was the Andrews government – went away and said, ‘This is an issue and we are going to get on with it very, very quickly,’ and they did. Like any government, they needed to do so, and they put in place an authority to oversee it, which had the sole responsibility of ensuring that the new Building Code of Australia requirements applied to any buildings that were new in Victoria. They of course identified buildings that had been built with or in which these materials had been used. As the member for Narracan, a former builder, said, whether or not the materials had been applied technically as part of a wall or applied as part of the structure or whatever it might have been, the buildings were then able to be retrofitted after the event. We saw some examples of that which were quite important and which had to be done, some of which were quite substantial in size. The key point is that they were important and needed to be done, and we had an authority to do it.

Having an authority that registers and licenses builders and plumbers, inspects and audits building and plumbing work, provides a dispute resolution service for building issues, manages and audits domestic building insurance for insurance and residential work over $16,000 and enforces compliance through rectification orders is, in my view, very important. They are doing their job, but their job then should not extend to subsuming Cladding Safety Victoria at a time when one in five buildings identified by the current government have not been repaired under the specifications of the current government and when the current government is saying, quite rightly, that those buildings possess a potential risk and Cladding Safety Victoria has said they need to be replaced. Okay, gotcha – we all understand that and we all appreciate that. So why, when the job is only 80 per cent done, does the government then walk into the chamber and say, ‘It’s all over, it’s all done, give us a pat on the back. We deserve to be effusively praised – by ourselves, nonetheless – for doing a job that is not complete.’

It is not just a job, it is a job that is of the utmost safety importance. Not I, but a number of government members have referenced some pretty sad and fairly dangerous events that have occurred overseas for the extent of the danger that is potentially presented by some of this cladding material. Members of the government were highlighting those examples. I accept that and I accept their examples. I accept it, and I think they have raised some very important examples as to why it was necessary for an authority to get on with the job and why the then Andrews government did get on with the job very early on to say, ‘Yes, we need to do this. Yes, we need to come in and fix this problem. And yes, builders are not at fault because they simply put in place what was auspiced from the 1990s onward.’ I accept all of that, but what I do not accept is the government then coming in saying, ‘Job done,’ because the job ain’t done. It is like the Gippsland rail project: ‘Job not done.’ You cannot not build the one thing you said you were going to build and then say, ‘Oh, look, we’ve got it done.’ You cannot do 80 per cent of Murray Basin rail and say, ‘Job done.’ These things are not done. So I simply say, in conclusion, we do not oppose it. I do accept a number of the key points around safety that government members have raised. I accept them and think it was good work to get onto it very quickly and put in place a mechanism to fix it. But the job is not done, and I have concerns that it will be.

 Steve McGHIE (Melton) (17:26): I rise to speak in support of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, and I do respond to the member for Bulleen’s comments in regard to this bill that it is quite quizzical. He did repeat on numerous occasions that the job is not done. But I just have to remind him as he walks out of the chamber that the opposition are not opposing this bill, so they clearly must think the job is done. But anyway, we will move on.

I would like to use this moment to reflect on the journey that brought us to this moment, one that started in the early hours of November 2014 – a November morning 11 to 12 years ago when Victorians watched in horror as the Lacrosse tower in Melbourne’s Docklands was engulfed in flames. Non-compliant aluminium composite cladding, ignited by one single cigarette, sent fire racing up 13 storeys. Our fantastic Melbourne Fire Brigade crews responded to the reported fire at the multi-storey apartment building on La Trobe Street in the Docklands, and when they arrived, it only took them 5 minutes to attend to that incident. Fire had already spread through a further six floors above the room that was ignited and within just 11 minutes of the fire starting, it had reached above the 21st floor. As I earlier said, the cause of the fire was a cigarette butt on the balcony, but it was the building’s non-compliant external cladding that turned a small fire into a major emergency, allowing flames to travel rapidly and vertically through the building, penetrating multiple apartments along the way.

There were 400 residents, many of them students, who were safely evacuated from the building, and that is a testament to the incredible work of our emergency services. 120 firefighters attended that fire and 22 vehicles worked to bring the blaze under control in around 30 minutes, which was quite amazing given the significance of the fire. I thank those firefighters for doing such a great job in saving all of the people that were in that building; it was a remarkable response. But the speed and the scale of what unfolded that night laid bare just how dangerous non-compliant cladding truly was. Ultimately, what it did reveal was the work that this government needed to do, and that is what is before us.

The blaze was visible from across the city, and by extraordinary good luck, no lives were lost. But the image is seared into our collective memory. If you do not have memories of this event, I encourage you to check the documentation online. The photos go some way to capturing the horror. It is something that we never, ever want to see again, and hence Cladding Safety Victoria was created. Most of us have memories of seeing building fires, whether it is in our professional capacities, like the member for Pakenham, or the members for Werribee or Bass as members of their local CFA, or the member for Frankston as a FRV firefighter – well, you saw fires, didn’t you?

Paul Edbrooke interjected.

Steve McGHIE: Yes, that is right. They did great work in responding to emergency calls and we thank them for their efforts not only in the CFA but also in their former careers as firefighters. It is fantastic.

Of course every fire is a life-changing event, no matter how big or small. As a government, we are compelled to act to make sure that our communities are safe. The MFB’s post-incident analysis of this fire handed down in April of 2015 confirmed what many in the industry had feared, and that was that the noncompliant cladding or aluminium composite panelling had materially contributed to the fires that rapidly spread through that building down at the Docklands. While the appropriate use of external wall cladding was addressed in the Building Code of Australia, compliance had clearly fallen through the cracks, and this raised the troubling question of how many other buildings across Victoria were in the same position. Our community deserved answers on this, and in 2016 the Victorian Building Authority (VBA) launched the result of their major audit of building permits. Out of that, more than half did not comply with the cladding regulations – that is right, more than half. That was what was found. I think today we are still shocked by that.

The next year, at just before 1 am on 14 June 2017, we saw a fire that broke out in the kitchen area of a fourth-floor apartment at the 23-storey tower block in North Kensington, West London. Of course that tragedy was watched by many millions of people around the world. We watched London’s Grenfell Tower burn and the tragedy of those people in that fire. From the analysis there, what ignited that fire was a fridge freezer in a fourth-floor apartment. Despite a rapid response from fire crews, it was a tragedy. There were many lives lost in that fire. I think there were 72 lives lost in that fire, which was so traumatic. To watch the footage of it was so horrific. It was simply a tragedy, and it was a catastrophe and a consequence of systemic failures across the board by developers, by builders, by regulators and by gaps in government policy accumulated over many, many years.

The most significant part of the renovation of the Grenfell Tower was the addition of external cladding, of aluminium sheets bonded to a central plastic polyethylene core. In the report about that to the public inquiry, Professor Luke Bisby said that evidence strongly supports the theory that polyethylene material in the cladding was the primary cause of the fire’s spread. Of course 72 victims were failed, and their deaths were 100 per cent preventable. This is exactly what we tried to do here in Victoria in making sure that our buildings were safe from this highly flammable material, this cladding material used on many, many of our buildings, through the removal of that cladding so we would not see another episode of what happened in Kensington.

In 2019 a fire at the Neo200 building on Spencer Street in Melbourne had eerie similarities to the Grenfell disaster, but fortunately no-one lost their life. Residential buildings are particularly vulnerable to the effects of cladding fires because people can be asleep and windows are often left open. The amount of smoke generated by the Neo200 fire was frightening. Over 350 buildings in Melbourne were rated very high risk, and the Neo200 was regarded as only a moderate risk.

Grenfell and Lacrosse stand as a permanent and sobering reminder of what is at stake when we allow noncompliance to go unchecked in our built environment. But 10 years on from the Lacrosse fire flammable cladding fires continue to occur around the world, and progress on the systemic reforms recommended in the wake of these tragedies has been far too slow. These events, both at Lacrosse and at Grenfell, were the well-needed wake-up call that shaped what followed here in Victoria. There was of course the VBA audit, and the Labor government established the Victorian Cladding Taskforce. They were charged with investigating the true extent of noncompliant external wall cladding on buildings throughout our state.

The taskforce findings and recommendations were the foundation upon which the private residential cladding rectification program was established in July 2019.

I just want to give a shout-out to the CSV, and I will come to that in a minute. I just want to take the opportunity to sincerely thank the chairperson Rod Fehring, the deputy chairperson Sarah Clarke, the entire CSV board, CEO Dan O’Brien and every member of the CSV team for their dedication, expertise and tireless commitment to keeping Victorians safe. Their work has been genuinely world-leading, and I know that we have a lot of eyes watching us, with interstate and international agencies, other governments and other departments all paying close attention. By the time CSV concludes its work it will have delivered safety improvements to over 1660 buildings across Victoria, keeping many, many Victorians safe and shielding hundreds of thousands of residents from both physical harm and the crippling financial burden of self-funded rectification. The work that they have done has been amazing, hence the repeal of this bill. It is a good law. It has protected the Victorians, it has rewarded diligence and it reflects the kind of government action that makes a real and lasting difference to people’s lives. This was good work done, and I commend the bill to the house.

 Brad ROWSWELL (Sandringham) (17:36): I also rise to address the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. Similar to the member for Bulleen, who spoke before me, I think it is important for the house to note that the bill we are considering at the moment in relation to the government business program for this week appears to be the only piece of legislation being brought forward by the government, with a couple of other motions to be debated at some point of the government’s choosing during the week. The claim by the Minister for Energy and Resources during question time was – and I paid special attention to this; without demonstrating a prop, because that would be disorderly, I took note of it at the time – that this government has ‘new solutions that make life easier’ for every Victorian. I am sure that that has been tested within an inch of its life in some focus group somewhere. But having only this bill, the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, which in fact abolishes Cladding Safety Victoria, is hardly a new solution that makes life easier for every Victorian, in my view. If I was to offer advice to the government, it would be – a bit like my attempt at the high jump in a recent very well viewed social media video – to underpromise and overdeliver. The amount of times I have been sent that screenshot is quite extraordinary.

Specifically in relation to this bill, I am grateful to the member for Caulfield, my colleague Mr Southwick, for his leadership on behalf of the coalition in relation to this bill. As other speakers have addressed previously, we will not be opposing this legislation. But that does not mean that we do not have questions, which we believe to be legitimate questions, around the government bringing forward this legislation – the timing of it, the content of it, the impact and effect of the legislation that the government has brought forward. We believe those are legitimate questions which many other speakers on this side have asked and I intend to ask as well.

As others have addressed, this bill will wind up Cladding Safety Victoria, CSV, which is now quite evidently a time-limited body. It will transfer the residual functions of that body. It will repeal the cladding rectification levy. It will replace funding through a revised building permit levy structure. It will frame the CSV program as substantially complete. The bill will commence on 1 July this year or at proclamation, whichever occurs first. It is good to see the member for Croydon in the chamber, actually. I wonder if he has had any cladding issues in his electorate.

It does a number of things, and that is all very important. I did note the contribution of the member for Bulleen, who raised what I believe to be a very important question, which was: if there are one in five buildings which are still not compliant according to the government’s standards, and it is at this point that the government is choosing to bring forward this piece of legislation to wind down Cladding Safety Victoria and for the residual functions to be housed within the Building and Plumbing Commission, noting the two different roles of those two different organisations, is this the right time for the government to be putting their hands around each other and slapping each other on the back and saying, ‘Job well done’? I am just not sure that that is right.

If, as the member for Bulleen pointed out, something like 20 per cent of buildings in this state are still non-compliant according to the standards which have been set out, then why at this point in time would the government be seeking to bring forward this legislation – for it to be introduced, debated and come into effect within this timeframe – if the job is not actually done? Perhaps the reason for that is because, unlike what the minister for energy sought to convince this chamber and others of during question time today – that the government is full of ‘new solutions that make life easier for every Victorian’ – maybe that is just not true. Maybe the government has in some way run out of ideas. Maybe the ministers sitting on the front bench of the government side of this chamber have run out of ideas. Maybe there is some sort of stranglehold on the cabinet process and bills being brought forward through the cabinet process that propose, to again quote the minister for energy, ‘new solutions that make life easier for Victorians’.

I am very happy to stipulate some of those new solutions that could be considered that would actually make a real difference in the lives of Victorians at the minute. The Minister for Police tells us he has got a bunch of ideas in the top drawer or the bottom drawer – well, maybe it is time to dust those off to make our community safer. Maybe it is time for the Treasurer in the other place to dust off the tax savings that I am sure she is considering. Maybe it is time for the Minister for Health to dust off some ideas there as well and to make sure that when Victorians are sick there is an ambulance that arrives on time and there is resourcing within our public hospital system to care for those who are unwell at a time and place where they need that healthcare. Maybe it is time for the Minister for Education to do a deal with the union to give teachers and students and in fact parents the certainty that they require at this time. Maybe it is time –

Paul Edbrooke: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, I think it is time the member got back to the bill.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Paul Mercurio): I uphold the point of order. Please come back to the bill.

Brad ROWSWELL: Indeed. I thank the member for Frankston for his diligent observation of my parliamentary contributions. It is something that I can always rely upon the member for Frankston to do with much vigour and purpose, and it is something which he should be commended for. It is something he should be commended for because not many other people do it, frankly. Well done, member for Frankston.

Indeed on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 the point remains that this is the only bill on the government business program this week. The other two things on the government business program are motions. One of them quite clearly is a sledge motion, and the other – well, you know. And there is this bill, where the government is patting themselves on the back for a good job well done. It is only 80 per cent complete, and they are patting themselves on the back for it. Have they run out of ideas? Have they run out of what the minister for energy claims are ‘new solutions that make life easier for every Victorian’, or are they in fact out of ideas? I think it is a valid question to ask. But I thank the member for Frankston for being so astute in drawing me back to the bill.

I am grateful to the member for Caulfield for the work he has done on this bill, for the fact that he has taken the time to consider the matters before the house, that he has engaged with organisations like Master Builders Victoria, like the Association of Consulting Architects Australia, like Cardinia Shire Council, like industry expert – this will get him riled up, you watch – Michael Buxton and others –

Daniela De Martino interjected.

Brad ROWSWELL: Well, member for Monbulk, he is a very good constituent, I am sure. What a great contribution Mr Buxton has made and continues to make to bring truth and order to such matters as are before us now.

This bill primarily facilitates the transfer of responsibility for cladding to the BPC, the Building and Plumbing Commission. Setting aside again the differences between the purpose of Cladding Safety Victoria and the regulatory role the Building and Plumbing Commission has, the opposition will not be opposing this bill but fully encourages the government, perhaps not during this sitting week but perhaps once legs are up and breaks have been had on the government’s side, to come back with, as the minister has promised, new solutions that make life easier for every Victorian, because if there is a time when we are needing that, it is right now.

 Paul EDBROOKE (Frankston) (17:46): Happy birthday, Acting Speaker.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Paul Mercurio): Thank you.

Brad Rowswell interjected.

Paul EDBROOKE: If you had known that, you would have got about 3 minutes out of it, I reckon. Well, how do you top that? That was a totally adequate speech. There are not many gaps I can fill on that one. The boy from Sandy does it again. He did a good job.

Of course we are talking about the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, which has three major functions: it is obviously repealing the Cladding Safety Victoria organisation, it is repealing the cladding rectification levy and it is also adjusting the building permit levy to fund the Building and Plumbing Commission’s consumer-focused enforcement work. From the outset, though, I would like to say that there have been one or two opposition speakers that have mentioned the member for Bulleen’s contribution. I am not sure where he got his statistics – I am not even sure they are out-of-date statistics – but claiming that there are 20 per cent of in-scope buildings which have not been addressed by the program is incorrect. As of 28 February this year 442 of the 448 private residential buildings approved for rectification works funding had been completed, the remaining six buildings are in the construction phase and two further private residential buildings have been addressed without any cladding works required, so that clarifies that. There have been members that have talked about the horrific Grenfell fire and the Lacrosse fire as well, which I will get on to in a second.

This bill talks about something that we are winding up but something I think we should be incredibly proud of. We have adapted and overcome something that put people’s lives in danger. We saw that in November 2014. I was on night shift, and although there was no danger of anyone in Frankston attending that fire, we were looking at the news broadcast of the Lacrosse fire. We were more than a little bit stunned about how the whole building was not on fire, but it seemed like the cladding was on fire. Although we had seen smaller versions of this before – single storeys, things like that – I do not think anyone that I was working with at that time, amongst the shifts in south-east Melbourne, had ever seen something like that. As we heard the member from Melton say, it was basically ignited by one cigarette and put life at risk. Then of course, moving forward, we saw the tragic Grenfell fire and the even more tragic consequences of that and how difficult, politicised and, I guess, not pragmatic some of those solutions were to that fire. That night I was working, and we knew after a couple of hours of hearing what was going on that there was a bit of a new frontier that was going to have to be tackled, and when I saw that I guess I made the transition from being a firefighter to being in politics.

But at the same time in Frankston there was a fairly well publicised residence, a block of about 90 units, at Culcairn Drive, and I know the member for Mornington, as the member for Dunkley, advocated fairly strongly, along with me, for those residents.

But along with some other issues at those residences, what we saw was an investigation into their cladding, which found many, many other issues, which is also why we have legislated or introduced a bill, which we will see tomorrow, with some of the issues that have been somewhat solved by evidence that was provided from residences like Culcairn Drive. When that building was assessed for flammable cladding, it was found it did have some. But one of the biggest issues was not the cladding, it was that it was not up to code. Somehow this building had got an occupancy certificate. People had moved in, people had put their life savings into buying a property – it was their nest egg, the main investment they might have throughout their life, apart from their super. What we saw was that after a building assessment, the assessor basically said that they would remove the occupancy certificates, that there was no waterproofing in some rooms and that the balconies actually had shifted and were falling down. Terribly and negligently, an interior fire alarm system had been put on the exterior of the building, and that was actually rusting off – which does not help the cladding issue much. But also in a residence where you have parking underneath where people live, under the building code in Australia you need a sprinkler system to protect people from car fires and whatnot, and there was no sprinkler system, even. Those residents had to band together and take legal action, and eventually we took the building licence off that individual as well.

I know that those opposite are not going to contest this with a vote, but I get the impression today that those opposite do not understand the relevance of this and the impact of this. If Cladding Safety Victoria was not there to do this work and if the government did not fund this work, we might well be looking at something else purporting to the level of a Grenfell, where I think over 70 people perished. Looking at some of the reports or the after-action reviews of what the emergency services had to do during that fire, it was real kind of 9/11 Twin Towers stuff – above and beyond the call of duty with equipment that was not designed to be doing what it was doing in a building that was not designed to withstand that kind of heat. And what happens to these structures when you do have cladding on fire? Well, it heats up the structure, the metal of the structure expands and the integrity of the structure goes very quickly, and that is very dangerous for people inside, whether they be residents or whether they be emergency services workers. What we were doing by stepping in was actually backing in Victorians and preventing that kind of story happening again. As I explained to one constituent who said, ‘We don’t need to spend money on this. That’s why we have smoke detectors,’ well, smoke detectors do not work on the outside of the building. If the outside of the building is on fire, buildings are not usually designed – unless you are out in the bush somewhere with a BAL rating – to withstand fire from the outside; it is usually the other way around. It is something we needed to take action on, and I fully believe we did. I think it is only a Labor government that stands up for working families in the biggest purchases that they make. We have seen that in the past where the Liberal Party have failed to support residents and community members in Frankston and in Victoria by not backing them in. It is programs like this that everyone should be proud of. We protected Victorians from combustible cladding–related harm.

I want to take a moment to thank CSV chairperson Rod Fehring, the deputy chairperson Sarah Clarke, the entire CSV board, CEO Dan O’Brien and the entire team for their tireless work, because by the time CSV are wound down, they will have actually made over 1660 buildings safe, and that has protected well over hundreds of thousands of Victorians from potential harm.

As you know, we often take a potentiality as something for granted until it happens and people die. Then we have royal commissions and we have inquiries about why things were not done. To me, CSV was government backing in Victorians, keeping Victorians safe and blocking off one of those holes in the Swiss cheese model, so to speak, of risk, making sure that Victorians were not going to end up in another Lacrosse, in another Grenfell and emergency services workers would not be put in those terrible positions where they really had no choice. They really had no choice about doing what they did. They were put in a really bad spot, and kudos to them; they did an incredible job. But to fund this program, to, I think, be a bold government that took action before another incident happens, says a lot about this government’s attitude towards housing, towards residents and towards our community. We do listen. We do take things seriously. We are pragmatic in the way we do things. We do not just sit back and give sympathetic smiles to people. We have to take action, and I am proud of what we have done.

 Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (17:56): I rise too to contribute on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 and make it clear from the outset, as other members on this side have done today, that we do not oppose this bill, because Cladding Safety Victoria was never intended to be permanent. It was established as a response to a crisis – a necessary intervention when Victoria’s building system had failed, and failed in a way that put people’s safety, homes and financial security at risk.

Of course this refers to, largely, high-rise apartment buildings and the tragedies that have occurred. In Mildura, you might be surprised to learn, we do not have any high-rise apartment buildings. In fact I think our planning scheme dictates that we can go three levels high and that is it. So what does the member for Mildura have to say about Cladding Safety Victoria? Well, actually quite a lot. You might be surprised. Stick around and find out, because it might be story time – who knows. It is 6 pm on a Tuesday, and with the engagement and apathy levels in this place, it looks like we need a story or two.

We do not have a huge amount of high-rise apartment buildings. But I was, as I do most weekends, driving around my electorate, going to events and different things, and I was actually doing a count of the affordable and social housing. As you may or may not know, before this role I was in local government. It was identified that in regional Victoria – and this bill gives me a chance to talk about housing, obviously – and particularly in some of the small towns, the market has failed. It is hard to get tradies to build houses, build homes, build flats in small towns, particularly those like – well, Ouyen actually has a developer and a builder that has moved back there. They built 18 new homes privately for new families.

A member: Wow.

Jade BENHAM: I know. In a town of less than a thousand people, 18 new homes in a year is huge. That is due to the opening up of land. We still have a bit to go with the old school site in Hunt Street, which is very close to the CBD; that needs to be able to be developed. But it is amazing when you can attract tradies to come to town and build and send their kids to school, get involved in local cricket clubs, footy clubs, all the rest of it. Since then also our pharmacist in Ouyen – Alex Look is his name – has moved from Brisbane actually to buy the Ouyen Pharmacy and has actually redeveloped it. He moved, bought his own premises. No-one ever thought that there would be a new pharmacy in, like I said, a town of less than a thousand people. But this is what happens when you actually stimulate the market, bring trades: young families move back.

It attracts new people.

A member interjected.

Jade BENHAM: Yes, planning. Planning and opening the doors for business, because where there is a gap in the market, the private sector will generally fill it if they can identify that market. In my municipality, when I was a councillor and a mayor, the private sector did not fill that lack of housing, but there was zero rental stock and zero social housing. So I got to work with the then CEO of the Swan Hill Rural City Council to identify what local government could do. There is certainly a role for government at all levels to be able to solve the housing crisis, some of which may not be the typical remit of any level of government. You would not think council’s usual remit would be to start building houses. But again, during my first year and being quite green to the local government sector, I sat down with the CEO – and it is also hard when officers are based an hour and a half away and do not quite understand the local landscape, and it is even harder for departments and bureaucrats based in the city to understand the local concept on the ground out in the regions, obviously. I said to the CEO, ‘Our budget is in surplus. Why can’t we go to RDV and invest that money and just start building houses?’ There were some other councillors that were opposed to that – ‘not the job of council’. I agree, it is not usually the job of council to start building houses, but in this case it was the only way that we were going to fill a gap. So we did go to Regional Development Victoria. The Leader of the House at the time was the Minister for Regional Development. That was the first time I had met the minister, and she came to turn the sod on that project. We ended up building eight three-bedroom homes on very small blocks. It was some surplus land, an old road reserve actually, that we had rezoned.

Local government have a role to play here – being open for business, going to state or federal governments to get titles for an old road reserve to be able to build houses on it. We did that, we got some investment from Regional Development Victoria. We built eight houses that were to be sold by private treaty rather than auction, because what happens often in regional areas is we could build some beautiful new houses, but there are those labour hire providers and other investors, let us say, that will attend the auctions and buy everything up, which leaves us with no long-term rental stock, no housing for healthcare workers, locum pharmacists et cetera. So we decided that auction was not the way to go – it also was not the way to go to keep those houses affordable. We agreed to sell those eight houses via private treaty, which we did. We started with the first four, and then that investment, once they were sold, was going to build the next four. That is what we did. They are now complete. They all sold really quickly. It was really good local decision-making, kept local, to fill a gap that the locals understood was needed, and also local government got involved in something that is not typically their remit but they understood the gap in the market.

Since then we have also had investment from Murray Valley Aboriginal Co-operative, who have been successful in a grant to provide Indigenous housing for Indigenous youth and men, which is amazing. That is a huge project. There has also been the worker accommodation program. There are another 10 houses being built now. Haven Home Safe have also built 13 additional homes, which are all now filled. So in my time in public office, in one town – depending on who you talk to, the population of Robinvale is anywhere from 3500 to, at this time of year, about 12,000 people – we have managed to build 31 new homes by just offering up solutions, coming to the table with a problem, yes, but also having some ideas that might be a bit audacious. I know people often laugh at me when I come to the table with big audacious ideas.

But this audacious idea has provided 31 new homes for families, for healthcare workers and for teachers. The Leader of the Opposition came to Robinvale to have a look at some housing, which is my next idea, the Department of Education housing. She was the Shadow Minister for Education at the time. I would invite the current Shadow Minister for Education to get on board.

Brad Rowswell: I accept.

Jade BENHAM: Excellent, because I have some more ideas with education in Robinvale. But the next audacious idea – and this is not unique to any small rural town – is around the Department of Education, which has huge blocks of land in very central locations a lot of the time with very large, very old dilapidated houses sitting on them with sometimes one person in them and sometimes no-one in them at all. The idea to fill the gap – and fill it very, very quickly here – is to redevelop those blocks into one- and two-bedroom units so then we can fill the vacancies with attractive housing for teachers to come out to regional areas where they will get a very unique experience teaching, particularly in some of our P–12 schools, and also to develop the Hunt Street site in Ouyen, whether that be for family homes to bring more families back to Ouyen or one- and two-bedroom units for healthcare workers at Mallee Track or Ouyen P–12 or wherever it is. These issues are not unique to small towns, but I dare say there would be sites that we could identify all around rural Victoria. And I say ‘rural’, because there is a very big difference between how we define ‘regional’ and ‘rural’.

 Josh BULL (Sunbury) (18:06): I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a contribution on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 and to follow on from comments and contributions that have been made this evening that go to the matters that this bill deals with, which I will come to shortly. I will make some comments about the response that was provided at a time when we saw some significant incidents globally when it came to the use of cladding and the tragic events that occurred as a result of the use of these materials. The contributions that have been made this evening have well canvassed the provisions and some of the history of the response that was provided by the government upon the work that was done by the cladding safety taskforce and the $600 million that was provided for rectification. The work that was done at the time was a significant and important announcement. The instances of Grenfell and Lacrosse, Lacrosse in 2014 and Grenfell in 2017, showed the concern – more than concern regarding the tragedy that struck in the UK. But there was recognition that these materials were used all too commonly, and there was such significant concern about the way that when a fire would break out it had the ability to cross floors. I listened to the member for Frankston’s contribution around the use of these materials and what that would then mean for those buildings.

To be able to provide for the rectification and indeed the safety of residents and those that are in those buildings is something that is of great concern and was of great concern to so many of us in this place and the wider community. The work that has been done is significant and important and goes to the heart of community safety. Understanding that and the repeal, due to the work that has been done and the processes which this bill deals with, is indeed something that is very, very important. As others have said, community safety is any government’s top priority. Making sure that the use of building materials is safe and robust and, most importantly, protects the residents and those that are in these dwellings is something that is very important.

What we know and understand is that the work that has been done is incredibly important, and we acknowledge and thank all of those that have done the work. Of course it builds upon the work, as I mentioned earlier, of the taskforce and responds to the situation that is at hand. The bill will repeal the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020 and abolish Cladding Safety Victoria as an agency, including abolishing the CSV board and the role of the CEO. It will transfer the property rights and liabilities to the Victorian Building Authority and amend the Building Act 1993 to confer upon the VBA cladding safety related functions to enable the VBA to complete any outstanding cladding safety related activities after CSV is abolished, transfer remaining employees to the VBA and a range of other functions. Making those changes and those provisions draws to a natural conclusion the work, but we say that in the context of making sure that we remain committed, vigilant and practical when it comes to building materials in this state and knowing that we do have such significant growth, both in terms of population and in terms of the housing that has been identified as a priority of the government. We know that this work is and has been very important. We need to make sure that we are working with our building authorities, our regulatory agencies and those that are on the ground every single day doing this important work to make sure that we are in a situation where we are strongly enforcing the rules and the provisions when it comes to materials, so that in essence we do not find ourselves in this same place again.

The establishment of Cladding Safety Victoria in 2019 to oversee the private residential cladding rectification program and the work that was done went to working closely with building owners to rectify high-risk cladding and make buildings safer for Victorians by reducing cladding safety risk. At the conclusion of the programs it is important to put on the record and acknowledge that Cladding Safety Victoria will have rectified around 450 private residential apartment buildings, assessed over 21,000 buildings for cladding risk, worked with the government to improve the safety of users of 133 government buildings and funded remediation works and produced cladding risk information for more than 80,000 privately owned apartments. They are significant and important numbers, and they are numbers that are not just numbers; they are people’s dwellings. They are buildings where we know people are, and to prevent the tragedies that I mentioned at the start of this contribution to go to some of that work is really, really important.

The work that was done at the time was well thought and indeed needed to have a rapid response. Being in this place at the time, I remember the work of Richard Wynne as the former planning minister, and the work of the whole team in getting this program up was something that was very important and provided an opportunity to respond in a timely manner and in an efficient and effective way. What we need to make sure that we do is continue to work with our agencies going forward and continue to make sure that the use of these materials and of any material within the community that goes to the provision of housing, of community infrastructure and of any or all of the programs, projects and initiatives that are being delivered each and every day in this state is regulated and done in a timely and effective way. What we see is a set of circumstances where the government had to at the time – and being a member of that government at the time, I can make some reflections – deal with something that needed to be done in a fast and effective manner, and I do want to thank the entire team who I think stood this up really quickly, did a really significant and important job to get this going and most importantly led to a situation of improved community safety.

What the bill seeks to do is to draw to a natural conclusion the government’s position where that work has concluded, with the recognition that we need to make sure we are continuing to do all of the groundwork, all of the preparatory work, all of the work around regulation and reform to make for a better and safer system.

I do want to acknowledge again the team that have been able to deliver these numbers. They should not be seen as isolated numbers, but as the government’s response to what was a very serious and significant problem within our community. To be able to allocate $600 million-plus to deal with these matters was something that was really important. Time and time again we come into this place and we hear all sorts of characterisations from those opposite about allocations and investment of money, but what you must do in government is be responsible for community safety and deliver timely, effective and robust programs that go to supporting those in our community who deserve support and, of course, make for community safety and a better standard of living, because the alternative, which we saw in the UK, was tragedy. This was a response that was needed, and this was an important response that was delivered. I want to again thank all of those people that have done an amazing job to get this done. This draws the work to a natural conclusion, but of course we continue to be committed to community safety. I commend the bill to the house.

 Chris CREWTHER (Mornington) (18:16): This evening I rise to speak on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. Let me say at the outset we will not be opposing this bill. This bill repeals the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020, abolishes Cladding Safety Victoria – otherwise known as CSV – as a standalone body, transfers its remaining functions, staff, rights and liabilities into the broader regulator and repeals the cladding rectification levy component while replacing it with a lower levy component within the building permit system. That is the substance of the bill before this chamber. But this bill is not insignificant. In fact it raises a much larger question: what exactly has this Labor government done on this issue over the last 10 years, and what exactly is this government asking Victorians to believe? The story that this government wants to tell us is that the cladding crisis is effectively behind us, that the hard work has been done and that this bill is simply a neat bit of tidying up at the end of a successful chapter – a chapter, I might add, that would not have come about if this government had done their job in the first place. That is the political message that this Labor government is putting out, but the problem is that for too many Victorians, and certainly for families connected to places like Culcairn Drive in Frankston South, in the member for Frankston’s electorate, that story is nowhere near the lived reality.

The government itself described this repeal as marking the successful completion of Victoria’s efforts on combustible cladding. Its second-reading explanation says that CSV was established to rectify or make safe buildings with flammable cladding and that this bill marks the successful completion of those achievements. But the government’s own 2024–25 annual report says that 1346 class 2 buildings in CSV’s program were resolved and that this represented 81 per cent of the program. That same report says that works had been completed on 409 higher-risk residential buildings. This government wants to talk about completion and success, but its own public reporting still describes a program that was not yet fully complete. That contradiction matters, because when governments start abolishing agencies and congratulating themselves before affected residents feel safe, before the last difficult cases are genuinely resolved and before accountability has truly bitten, people lose faith. They hear ministers saying ‘world-leading’ and other terms like that and they think, ‘This is not what it feels like inside my very own home’.

That is why I want to bring this debate back to Culcairn Drive in Frankston South. I have worked with these residents for many years, since late 2018, when I was the federal member for Dunkley, even though this was a state issue at the time. I met with them and I raised their plight repeatedly in the media and in so many different forums.

This was a plight that came about due to this government’s failed regulatory oversight and indeed their failed enforcement of existing laws under the building system. In November 2024 I said in this Parliament that many of the owners and residents of 5 Culcairn Drive in Frankston South had been forced to move out, that I had raised this issue eight times in Parliament – and I know I have raised it more since – and that the residents had been facing what I called a living nightmare, with cladding issues, balcony collapses, cracking and more. I note that one resident who had his own home there was forced to live in a van, effectively homeless when he actually had a home, because of the issues in his apartment. What I said at the time is still true to this day. That was not an exaggeration – that was a plain description of what these people have endured and what they continue to endure.

The public record on that building is shocking. The ABC reported on it and described the Frankston complex as ‘wrapped in a highly combustible form of polystyrene’. Residents were told to remove mulch and trees because of fears that a small garden fire could quickly engulf the block. The same reporting – and what I saw in person – detailed balcony collapses, water leaks, mould and even mushrooms growing inside apartments. I know that they could not use their basement for parking and were actually forced to park in the street, whereupon they were then getting fines from the local council for parking on the street when they could not park in their own apartment building. Another report recorded that owners had received an emergency order around Christmas at the time, stating that the condition of the building posed a danger to life, with the threat of fines if works were not done – fines that would be imposed for what would be millions and millions of dollars worth of works for people that just did not have the money.

That is what this debate is really about – not abstractions, not agency charts, not anything else, but families being told that the place they saved for, borrowed for and built their lives around was a danger to life. Here is the heart of the problem. This Labor government’s cladding response has too often fixed the headline but not the whole harm. Even when cladding funding or rectification pathways existed, residents were still left confronting wider defects underneath and behind those walls. ABC reporting on the Frankston complex made clear that removing the cladding could expose other building faults – as it did – and that the works might not extend beyond replacing the combustible material itself. In other words, this Labor government could say it had addressed the cladding risk, while owners were still left with leaking windows, structural issues, defective exits, faulty systems and enormous financial exposure – and that is what has occurred. Eventually money was put aside towards fixing the cladding issue, but residents have been left millions and millions of dollars more out of pocket. That is 33 residents there who have had to share in a massive financial burden that has sent many broke and to the wall with mental health issues and much more. Many of these residents and former residents are still impacted to this day.

I raised in a speech previously to this Parliament that in this situation the surveyor, the builder and the developer were all related and signed off on the project. I noted, and I continue to note, that residents lost money and were impacted with mental health issues and more. I mentioned the gentleman in his van, effectively made homeless when he had a home. I note as well that, as was mentioned by the member for Frankston, eventually the builder did lose his licence, but there was a lack of prosecution of that person and the others involved in this project, and I note that that builder continues to operate to this day through his own son. There seem to be little to no consequences for those doing the wrong thing, and residents are still out of pocket to this day. It again comes down to failed regulatory oversight and failed enforcement under this government. I note that I was introduced to so many owners and residents in other properties across Melbourne and across Victoria through the residents at Frankston South, who raised enormous issues and even raised people who had taken their lives because of this issue.

That is why this bill should not be read as a triumph. It is not a complete solution; it is only a partial solution that has been sold as a closure. It should be read as a reminder of the government’s broader failure in building oversight. The Victorian Auditor-General found that the Victorian Building Authority did not meet all the government’s performance targets and did not consistently monitor and report its progress against those targets and recommendations. The Auditor-General also said the VBA had not been transparent with the public in the way that the Minister for Planning required.

This is incredibly serious, because when you have a building regulator that is supposed to protect Victorians from exactly this kind of systemic failure but is not meeting targets and not transparently reporting progress, the public is entitled to ask where the transparency was and where the accountability was before families ended up trapped in unsafe buildings or indeed millions out of pocket, as I have mentioned. Where was the enforcement, and where still is the enforcement to this day? Where there is a lack of enforcement as well, people are at risk of losing lives, losing money and being in unsafe buildings, and indeed other builders who are doing the right thing cannot compete properly with those doing the wrong thing who can outcompete them on price.

In conclusion, we will not oppose this bill but let us be very clear about why: we are not opposing it because the existence of a temporary standalone structure and agency cannot go on forever. We are not opposing it because in form it mainly transfers functions and tidies up arrangements. But nor should anyone on that side of the house pretend that this repeal wipes the slate clean. It has not erased the anguish of Culcairn Drive. It has not erased the costs imposed on innocent owners. It has not erased the years of delay. It has not erased the regulatory failures that allowed buildings like that to be approved and occupied in the first place. It has not erased the fact that such residents continue to be out of pocket to this day. It has not erased the fact that there continues to be a lack of enforcement and a lack of prosecution for those who have done the wrong thing. If Labor wants to abolish Cladding Safety Victoria, then the least Victorians deserve is honesty. They need honesty that building safety is not achieved when government says the matter is over; it is achieved when residents can finally say with confidence that their homes are safe, that their homes are fixed and that justice is brought about for those who are responsible.

 Gary MAAS (Narre Warren South) (18:26): I too rise today to make a contribution indeed in support of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I note the passion that goes with the contribution that the member for Mornington was making, but if you are so passionate, how come your side of politics never, ever supports any consumer-focused building reform that is put forward by this government? Why isn’t it ever supported? It never, ever is. If you are going to bring that kind of passion to this place, you have got to be able to back it up with some substance as well, and we are certainly not seeing that from the opposition.

This legislation marks the successful completion of Cladding Safety Victoria’s work and the beginning of new powers given to the Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC) to protect consumers for years to come and ensure that dodgy builders do face consequences. Our government understand building or buying a home is the single biggest investment most Victorians will make in their entire lifetime, and we are fighting for working families who do get this opportunity from getting caught up in debt stress or the headache of having the dream of building your own home ruined by those dodgy builders who do the wrong thing. This is especially prevalent when cost of living is front of mind for so many. Builders do not need to deal with the stress of potential debt as a result of dodgy building works. The bill shows how this government is on the side of working families, making sure that the goal of having your dream home becomes a reality and that homes are safe, affordable and are built to last as well. Victorians deserve to have the confidence that work will be done right the first time and that there is a regulator that is on their side in the event that things do go wrong.

The Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026 has three major functions: repealing Cladding Safety Victoria, repealing the cladding rectification levy and, finally, adjusting the building permit levy to fund the Building and Plumbing Commission’s consumer-focused enforcement work. As many have already mentioned before me, the terrible building fire that was caused by noncompliant cladding at the Lacrosse apartment tower in Docklands back in 2014 is something that has stuck with all of us. That led to a major audit of external wall cladding by the Victorian Building Authority (VBA). Of course the London Grenfell Tower incident in 2017 reinforced that. That incident, however, which tragically killed some 72 people, showed the catastrophic risk of noncompliant building works.

These incidents revealed what can happen when there are failures by developers, builders and regulators and where there are gaps in policy.

At the same time as the VBA audit, the state Labor government established the Victorian Cladding Taskforce. It was tasked with investigating the extent of noncompliant wall cladding on buildings throughout Victoria. The taskforce’s recommendations led to the establishment of the private residential cladding rectification program and the subsequent creation of Cladding Safety Victoria 2020 to protect Victorians from combustible cladding–related harm. This bill marks the successful completion of Victoria’s world-leading cladding rectification work carried out by Cladding Safety Victoria. The work of this organisation has been really successful and is something that we can be really quite proud of in Victoria. Cladding Safety Victoria is on track to substantially complete its programs by June 2026, and by this time rectification works will have been completed on nearly 450 private residential apartment buildings, mostly in inner metro Melbourne, and 131 public-use buildings too.

In addition to the successful completion of Cladding Safety Victoria’s work, the bill will also futureproof the Building and Plumbing Commission. The bill repeals the cladding rectification levy, which will see a reduction in building costs for builders while also helping prospective consumers looking to build their own home. This means that consumers will save between 47 per cent and 66 per cent on cladding rectification levy costs, putting money back into homebuyers pockets, where it belongs. The bill will also adjust the building permit levy to bolster the Building and Plumbing Commission for years to come and ultimately protect consumers too.

The work of the Building and Plumbing Commission is important in helping to protect consumers from the stress and financial burden of having to deal with bad building work on their own. This will help the stress and heartache of chasing dodgy builders, trying to get them back to rectify missing or noncompliant works and then potentially having to take further action through our VCAT system or, in even harsher cases, through the court process. Of course there are so many great builders out there who are doing the right thing, but many good businesses are being undercut by many dodgy operators who continue to subcontract through that supply chain and who try to make a quick buck at the expense of Victorian families.

I am pleased to hear that those opposite are not opposed to the bill, and it is good to see that they are at least taking a little bit of a break from thinking about themselves for a change and actually trying to assist Victorians. We remember last year, when this government introduced the buyers protection legislation to establish the BPC and to give it tough new powers to protect consumers, that those opposite stood in opposition. I made the point earlier that it is generally true that in this place whenever we introduce some consumer-focused building reform where we start to enact that good consumer-focused policy in the building industry through the legislative process those opposite will generally oppose it. They are good at generally standing in opposition to things that help everyday working people. They have stood in this place and effectively said, ‘No, we won’t fix the building system. Consumers, you’re your own.’ It is no surprise to me that they opposed the BPC. They always take the side of those selling rather than those who are purchasing.

This state Labor government will always help Victorian families to own a home that is safe, a home that is affordable and one that is built to last. Our government has its bona fides in backing families when it comes to previous legislation that has covered housing reform in this state. I point to the creation of the Building and Plumbing Commission, the banning of underquoting, making real estate agents disclose the actual sale price of homes and helping first home buyers to get into the market through stamp duty exemptions.

As we all know, it is hard enough to get into the housing market on your own or to own your own home. We are committed to making sure we help Victorians, especially those just starting out, by building more high-quality homes where people want to live.

This bill is a good bill. It concludes the important work of Cladding Safety Victoria, and it really does signal an important step in the establishment of the Building and Plumbing Commission to ensure high-quality builds for future homes, especially as we begin to increase housing supply. I know that many young people in my electorate are looking to break into the housing market, and I know that the passage of this bill will help them not only with cost but with the quality of their first home as well. It is for those reasons that I commend this bill to the house.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (18:36): In rising to speak to the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, I know we have had a broad range of contributions around the purpose behind this bill and what we are working on with the Building and Plumbing Commission, which I am particularly excited about for the fast-growing community that I represent. But I do just want to briefly reflect on cladding. Before November 2014, as some of my colleagues have observed, when that fire at the Lacrosse towers happened, I have to admit, as a kid from the suburbs, I had no idea what cladding was. It did not sound particularly appealing. I note that the member for Morwell has observed that cladding looks smart and good. Well, I have seen a fair bit of cladding now that we have been removing it, and thinking of Grand Designs and Kevin McCloud, in the spirit of Kevin McCloud, I think that he would frown at this design choice to have cladding. I think, rather than looking smart and good on the side of a building, it could be described as being tacky and life threatening, as we tragically found out in the case of Grenfell in London. In 2017 we saw, as the result of those catastrophic regulation failures and a lot of different issues, particularly too with the service that they had there and the response, 72 lives were lost at Grenfell. These victims were failed by these different – some would say bureaucratic – failures, but some of them were quite real and on the ground as well. This noncompliant – well, we say ‘noncompliant’, but this design choice, I have to say, led to the lives that were lost at Grenfell. We have to make sure that we never see this kind of cost-cutting and, frankly, tacky material used in the way that we construct our buildings anymore.

I know the member for Frankston reflected on his experience as a firefighter. I would like to add just a couple of little notes about what we get trained in around the risk of combustible cladding, although as I will go to, it is becoming less of a risk in Victoria of course. But you see the different materials on those PowerPoints when you do your responding to urban fire training, and one of the issues we have with the rise of plastics and composite materials in building and construction is that we see more risk in places where we choose to live, work or send our kids to school. When it comes to that pyrolysis and the breakdown of the material, particularly the foam in cladding, it can cause toxic fumes as well as non-combusted materials to travel through a building and end up spreading essentially what is fuel – it is like having petrol, except vaporised – all through that property. Of course we saw what happened at Grenfell, where a fire should have been contained – that is how we build our apartments now; we build them as little fire jails, as some people refer to them – to that apartment or that fire jail, but instead, because of that tacky and life-threatening design choice that was made to clad that building in aluminium composite material, we saw those lives lost in London.

It is forever ingrained in all the training material and all the experience that you get in the fire brigades around our state to always look out for material like this, because it is unpredictable and it is dangerous.

Once we saw the results of these fires and those learnings that we had particularly from overseas, the Labor government established that cladding taskforce, which we are looking at repealing elements of – Cladding Safety Victoria, which came out of that taskforce – in this bill today. This bill is about repealing Cladding Safety Victoria, but it is not about necessarily removing the purpose behind CSV. It is around making sure that it is incorporated into what is our quite nation-leading response to building safety and compliance through the Building and Plumbing Commission. It marks a successful completion of the rectification works, and I will go to a few of the figures in just a moment. But it is remarkable, at least in the case of 2014 – I was not in government, obviously; I was at university – to see that early response. And then in 2019 – and I am showing how young I am – I saw that response while I was working in government, and now to see it come to a conclusion is something that this government can feel quite proud of: to see an entire rectification program through from start to finish.

There are some other things around the cladding rectification levy that hopefully, if those builders pass it on, will reduce some of those costs for people constructing their dwellings, which would be covered by that CRL at the moment, and also adjust the building permit levy to make sure that we can continue to fund those compliance processes in the Building and Plumbing Commission, which has been quite topical these last few weeks. We have seen a lot of reports, and we will obviously be discussing here in this chamber this week why the BPC’s work is so important. Thanks to this work – I have got a few figures here, if I may indulge the house by quickly finding the figures – we have seen a great deal of properties fixed when it comes to their cladding. We saw at the start 1660 buildings with noncompliant cladding identified. It is amazing now to see that there are only around six that have been identified as still needing rectification, and it is well within the scope of the new scheme to get that done. Of course a lot of these locations were in central Melbourne or those middle suburbs where we do see these sorts of medium- to high-rise density apartments that would have been clad with this tacky and life-threatening design choice.

Of course too it was not just places where people live but also places like hospitals and 11 police and, ironically, fire stations – I remember seeing that on the news and thinking, ‘Oh, goodness me’ – 27 public and community housing sites, five law courts and justice facilities, lots of TAFEs and a fair few schools. But of course through this program Cladding Safety Victoria has helped keep 18,885 Victorian students at those 40 schools safer because we have removed the tacky and life-threatening design choice of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I think it is important to reflect at this time that we want to try and create a framework that is more straightforward for our construction industry – hence the work that we are doing with the Building and Plumbing Commission. I would expect the small-‘l’ liberals opposite to be more supportive of things like streamlining regulation and making sure that there is a one-stop shop for people in the construction industry, but we have seen all sorts of fun and games from their response towards the BPC. This is an example of trying to make sure that there is a simpler process across government when it comes to making sure people are safe. Quite often I sit here and I hear people talk about regulation, and I think I spoke on this when we had the regulations bill only a few weeks ago.

I hear from some of the conservatives opposite this idea that ‘regulation is in the way. Get out of our way. We just want to do it. We don’t want more red tape.’ We do agree that red tape that is unnecessary should be reduced, and we have gone to a great length in this government to do that. But ultimately regulation is about the government setting a standard that the community has called for or that we have identified through expert opinion, or experiences from overseas in the cases of cladding, to make sure that people are kept safe. Ultimately all regulation and legislation should be there to keep people safe, and when it comes to the work of Cladding Safety Victoria, it is something to look back and be proud of, to see how we took something that was incredibly risky, incredibly unsafe, and turned it around as a state. It is something that we can look to as an example for other risks that may come out of building material innovation, and of course I encourage all people who work in that innovation space to think, in the future, ‘Is this going to be good for the people that live in this building, or will it simply be tacky and life threatening, like the cladding that we saw come out of the 1990s and 2000s?’ I commend the bill to the house.

 Kathleen MATTHEWS-WARD (Broadmeadows) (18:46): I rise to speak in support of the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. This bill is about something very simple and very important: keeping Victorians safe in their homes and making sure families are never again left to carry unbearable debt and stress because of dangerous building defects that were not their fault. This bill also marks the end of a major chapter in Victoria’s history, a chapter where we faced a serious problem head on, took responsibility and fixed it. Cladding Safety Victoria was created for a reason. It was created because people were living in buildings that were not safe. It was created because building owners were being told that they might have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, to fix dangerous combustible cladding. And it was created because government had a responsibility to step in when the system failed. Today, because of the work of Cladding Safety Victoria, tens of thousands of Victorians are safer in their homes. Because that work is almost complete, this bill responsibly winds the agency down, transfers the remaining work to the Building and Plumbing Commission and cuts building costs by repealing the cladding rectification levy.

This is a bill about completion, responsibility and consumer protection. Many of us remember the fires that changed the way the world thinks about cladding safety. In Melbourne we saw the Lacrosse building fire in Docklands. Flames raced up the side of the high-rise building. People ran for their lives in the middle of the night. And overseas we saw the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower in London. Seventy-two people lost their lives. The tragedy was not an accident, it was a result of dangerous materials, weak regulation and failures across the system. These events forced governments everywhere to ask hard questions: how many buildings are unsafe, and who will fix them? Here in Victoria, Labor did not look away: we acted. The Victorian government set up the Victorian Cladding Taskforce to find out how big the problem really was. That work showed us something deeply concerning: there were hundreds of buildings with combustible cladding, and many owners simply could not afford to fix them. So in 2020 Cladding Safety Victoria was established as a time-limited agency with one clear mission: to identify the riskiest buildings and make them safe, and that is exactly what has been done

Over the past six years Cladding Safety Victoria has delivered world-leading reform. It has remediated more than 99 per cent of the highest risk private buildings in Victoria. It has made schools, hospitals, public housing and community buildings safer. It has worked with owners, fire services, councils and industry to reduce risks and save lives. By the time its work is complete, more than 1600 buildings will have been made safer. That means hundreds of thousands of Victorians can now sleep easier at night. And just as importantly, it has protected families from being forced into crippling debt to fix a problem they did not cause. That is something we should all be really proud of. I want to place on record my sincere thanks to the chair, board members, CEO and every staff member of Cladding Safety Victoria. Their work has saved lives. Cladding Safety Victoria was never designed to exist forever. It was created to solve a specific problem, dangerous combustible cladding, and to wind down once that job was done. That point has now been reached. Most rectification work is complete, only a small number of remaining matters need to be finalised, and they will be done by the new regulator. This bill repeals the Cladding Safety Victoria Act 2020 and formally abolishes the agency because its job has been done.

This is a good government. It shows discipline and it shows respect for public money. Importantly the bill does not leave any loose ends. Any remaining cladding-related work will be transferred to the Building and Plumbing Commission, which is the strengthened building regulator created by this government. We know how important that work is. We need quality building and plumbing. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard stories of floods in apartment buildings because of dodgy work or dodgy materials that have been used, and how distressing and disrupting that is when people have to move out of their homes and relocate. They are displaced, their homes are damaged, their furniture is damaged, their clothes are damaged, and they have got to find somewhere else to live but also deal with all of the paperwork with the insurance and all of the rectification works. In apartment buildings it is usually not just confined to one apartment – because they are so close, it is a number of apartments. That is why we need commissions and that is why we need good regulators doing the work they do.

Furthermore, staff with specialist knowledge will transfer no-worse-off conditions, ensuring expertise is retained. The commission will be able to finalise any outstanding rectification works, make final payments, support owners and owners corporations, and advise the minister on cladding safety outcomes. No-one is left behind, no building is forgotten and no work is abandoned.

The bill also delivers real cost relief, and we know how important that is. The cladding rectification bill was introduced in 2020 to help fund this massive safety program, and at the time it was needed. But now, with the work largely finished, it is no longer required. The bill repeals the cladding rectification levy, and in its place a new lower building permit levy will apply only to large class 2 to class 8 buildings in non-regional Victoria with construction costs of over $1.5 million, and only until the 30 June 2029. For affected developments this means an overall levy reduction of between 47 and 66 per cent, and that is significant. It means lower construction costs, and when passed on, it means lower costs for consumers. Homes will be cheaper to build without compromising safety.

At the same time this bill makes sure that we do not repeat past mistakes. The Building and Plumbing Commission needs stable long-term funding to do its job, to protect consumers, hold dodgy builders to account and lift standards across the industry. This bill ensures that funding continues without overcharging industry and without placing unnecessary pressure on homebuyers. Cutting red tape should never mean cutting corners, and Labor will never allow safety to be optional. We have shown this time and time again. Labor steps in when the market fails, Labor protects consumers and Labor fixes problems, even when the work is hard and expensive. This bill sits within a much larger program of reform. The government has banned underquoting, forced real estate agents to disclose real sale prices, strengthened warranty protections, introduced developer bonds and created a building regulator with real enforcement powers. At the same time we are building more homes than any other state in the country – more approvals, more commencements, more completions.

Just recently I was at the topping-out of 120 new social homes in Broadmeadows, and I am really proud of that. I was there with Minister Shing. They are just wonderful quality. These homes will give so many people the dignity of a roof over their head, and they were beautiful. There was a dishwasher in there. More than 5 per cent of them are fully accessible, but in an apartment building they are all pretty accessible, so people with disabilities can access them as well. On top of that, 700 jobs have been created. My dad was in a wheelchair, and we know how hard it is to get accessible housing. It is so important that people can not only live in accessible housing but visit as well.

On top of this investment in Broadmeadows, in Hume Homes Victoria has completed 123 new homes and 161 new homes are underway. The Big Housing Build investment of $134 million has resulted in 1200 jobs being created. A further 85 homes have been completed, and 600 homes have had maintenance or upgrades in the Hume local government area. We are building more homes and building them better, because a house is not just an asset; it is dignity, it is security, it is safety and it is a home.

This bill does three important things. First, it honours the success of Cladding Safety Victoria and responsibly brings its work to a close. Second, it cuts building costs by replacing an outdated levy. Third, it protects consumers by ensuring a strong, well-funded building regulator into the future. This is balanced reform from a responsible government – Labor governing in the interests of working Victorians. Cladding Safety Victoria did what it was asked to do, and it did it well. This bill confirms its success, protects consumers and keeps our building system strong. It means safer homes, lower costs and lasting reform, and I wholeheartedly commend the bill to the house.

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (18:55): I am going to speak very briefly. I have got a lot of things to say, but I know others here are very keen to get up and speak on this bill as well. I could not possibly take time away from them – not reading my mobile phone and the text messages in the way that I should. I appreciate so much, member for Lara, your support for my having a couple of minutes on this before you get your opportunity.

I am speaking on the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026, and I am glad to hear that the opposition does not intend to oppose this bill. Why would they? This authority has made a terrific effort in making sure that Victorians are safer in their homes and their places of sport and entertainment and recreation. Thank you, Acting Speaker Mullaly, for your recommendation on that.

I want to take a moment to thank the CSV chairperson Rod Fehring and also the team down there: the deputy chairperson Sarah Clarke, the entire CSV board and CEO Dan O’Brien. This has been a big job to make Victorians safe. We all saw the horrors of what happened in the UK, and I do not think there could have been a worse tragedy for us to observe. Each of us would have seen that in our own way and thought of those large buildings in Melbourne and the risks that were in place for those. We also remember those circumstances down in Docklands as well. But the risk was to houses across this state – the risk of cladding being so flammable and so dangerous for our community. 157,000 Victorians are now safer because of Cladding Safety Victoria’s efforts. I do appreciate and thank them for those efforts, but the time has come to move these responsibilities into another area of government, as is appropriate when we get to the end of a significant program. I just want to note that the vast majority of buildings with non-compliant cladding were also in metropolitan Melbourne. We saw big examples in Port Phillip. We just heard Nina Taylor, the member for Albert Park, make some comments on this earlier.

The ACTING SPEAKER (John Mullahy): Correct titles.

Mathew HILAKARI: Sorry. Yes, correct titles. I can understand your impatience with me not getting on with this bill, so I will give the member for Lara a moment.

 Ella GEORGE (Lara) (18:57): It is a real pleasure to be rising to add a contribution to the Cladding Safety Victoria Repeal Bill 2026. I thank the member for Point Cook for yielding his time to me to make a contribution on this. This bill is truly something to be celebrated here today and something to be proud of as Victorians, because in Victoria we have led cladding rectification work. It has been a world-leading reform that has seen buildings across the state made safer with the removal of combustible cladding. It was a Labor government that established and funded Cladding Safety Victoria to protect Victorians from combustible cladding related harm. Cladding Safety Victoria went on to identify a number of buildings, both apartment buildings and publicly owned buildings, that put Victorians most at risk, then fronted half the cost of removal and made tens of thousands of homes safe from combustible cladding. Now that that work is done, this bill seeks to repeal the legislation that was required to establish the program of rectification in the first place. I would like to take this opportunity to commend the many ministers who have worked on cladding rectification over the years, completing this important work.

By the time Cladding Safety Victoria winds down, it will have left a huge impact across Victoria. I would like to conclude with a few statistics. Over 1600 buildings are safer, over 83,000 homes are safer, and over 157,000 Victorians are safer because of this important work led by a state Labor government. This is just one of the many reforms that this government has introduced to improve housing and to support home buyers in Victoria. On this side, we are so proud of all of that work. We are very proud of the world-leading work we have done to remove combustible cladding here in Victoria. We are proud to continue this work to support first-home buyers, to support renters and to support every Victorian to ensure that they live in a safe and comfortable home. With that, I am very pleased to commend this bill to the house. I wish it a speedy passage.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.