Tuesday, 10 May 2022

Construction industry

Mr DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan—Leader of the Opposition) (17:02): (1896) My adjournment tonight is for the attention of the Minister for Planning, and it relates to the VBA—the Victorian Building Authority—decision to increase fees and charges for builders, building surveyors, companies and tradies across a wide front from 2 May. So this is a huge set of increases: some of them are 200 per cent, some are 400 per cent and some are even more. These will hit tradies; they will hit small building companies. The building surveyors on whom much of our building and construction sector depends will be clobbered. They will be absolutely smashed by these charges.

These are huge charges—and of course some builders have got several firms, so they have multiple registrations and registration of themselves as practitioners. All of these charges, these increases, these extraordinary increases, are going to hit hard and will feed through into additional housing costs. Importantly this will hit tradies, builders and building surveyors in the first instance, but it will add to the cost of building homes across the state. This is an unwise increase.

Now, I understand the government’s new legislation that went through intends to register a number of different professional groups—painters, plasterers, tilers; the list is very long. It is unclear what the time cycle for many of these registrations is, and it is unclear how many in each category will be registered and what the rules will be. There is quite a bit of confusion about the way forward. But at the same time what is clear is that they have clobbered the existing registrants. The existing builders and the existing building surveyors are being hit hard with these increases.

What I am asking in the adjournment today is for the minister to look closely, to review these increases—the VBA seems to be out of control; it is an authority that no-one seems to be much in charge of—to review these charges, to examine the impact of these charges on the building and construction sector and ultimately on housing affordability and housing costs and to ask the VBA to back down from some of these charges. These should be reversed. These are too great. This is not a mild CPI increase; this is not even a modest increase to deal with what might be a legitimate workload issue at the authority. No, this is a huge surge in costs that is being passed through to the building and construction sector—to small tradies, to small builders and home builders—and it is going to force up the cost of housing. What on earth is the government thinking in doing this at this time, when housing is so expensive for young people, when housing is being made more expensive and when the cost of living is such an issue for so many tradies and those across the system? I ask him to review it.