Thursday, 18 August 2022

Building regulation reform

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:59): (2070) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Planning, and considers the Building, Planning and Heritage Legislation Amendment (Administration and Other Matters) Bill 2022 and specifically the increased burden it may place on rural and regional councils. One element of the bill provides that the relevant council’s municipal building surveyor must inspect certain classes of private building projects which have already been approved by a commercial building surveyor. There is real concern about what this may mean for smaller councils. What classes of building will be included? Will it simply apply to multistorey developments and therefore be of little impact, or will it require them to recruit additional surveying capacity or expand the operations of their own municipal building surveyors? Skills shortages are a massive problem for Victorian councils outside the tram tracks of Melbourne, and this government seems completely oblivious to this fact. How will costs be recovered? Councils already operate in a rate-capped environment, and local ratepayers should not have to subsidise a building regulation system which ought to be paid for by the user—the property developer.

Another unknown surrounds liability. Requiring a council building surveyor to check the work of a private building surveyor is likely to expose the council to liability should the worst later happen. Furthermore, as local councils will often have no direct involvement with each construction project, to ask them to come on site just before completion and assess at first sight compliance for the entirety of the preceding building work is potentially problematic. Why can’t the Victorian Building Authority do this? Why are local councils and the ratepayers who fund them now facing yet another burden? As ever with this government’s legislation, we do not know the answer to these questions of costs, of liability and indeed of which buildings will actually be covered. This will come in regulations. We have seen that before in this place—a bill passed in its general form and promised regulations emerging months down the line with much-watered-down democratic scrutiny.

So the action I seek is for the minister to meet me to discuss comprehensively his view on this matter and explain where he believes rural and regional councils’ responsibilities for building regulations should lie.