Thursday, 29 May 2025

Bills

Building Legislation Amendment (Buyer Protections) Bill 2025

Second reading

Debate resumed.

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:08): I rise to make a contribution on behalf of the Greens on the Building Legislation Amendment (Buyer Protections) Bill 2025. This bill makes some welcome changes to improve protections for people who are buying or who have bought a home or an apartment, and it addresses some of the major challenges that people have faced over the years with defective builds and the struggle to hold those responsible for those defects accountable. There is definitely more work to be done in this space, but this is a good step in the right direction.

There are just too many stories of disastrous builds that have left owners in incredibly stressful and ridiculously expensive situations, people feeling powerless and defeated by the scale of the issues. Many have been stretched to and beyond breaking point during the process of trying to hold builders accountable for these defective builds. Everyone knows someone who has had to deal with a defective building, anything from minor defects to major issues that cover the whole building or that are so complex that a solution is not immediately available. Trying to get action and accountability on these defects can be a literal nightmare for owners, so I am pleased that this bill is taking steps to address some of these issues.

Most builders out there are genuinely doing a great job. They are building good homes for people in this state, but we must acknowledge that the dodgy ones are leaving a trail of destruction across Victoria. Integrating regulation, insurance and dispute resolution for the building and plumbing industry is good. The implementation of these changes will be crucial. It is incredibly important that the new commission is well resourced and that claims and disputes can be processed thoroughly, fairly and in a timely manner. I am pleased that the new Building and Plumbing Commission will have enforcement powers when it comes to incomplete, defective or noncompliant building work. A developer bond is a great idea. Providing first-resort insurance is also something that I and my colleagues support. These measures will improve all protections for consumers and should hopefully take a lot of the strain and confusion out of dealing with defects and dodgy builders.

I would like to just briefly outline some of the issues that people have raised with my office and with my Greens colleagues. Some may them benefit from the passage of this legislation and others will continue to wait for further reforms to come. I have heard from people whose newly built home was so defective that their health and wellbeing were impacted. After moving into their home, things became so bad that their health deteriorated. They had to move out. They had to pay to live elsewhere and pursue legal recourse against the builders, who had big, insurance-company-provided law firms whose lawyers were doing everything to draw out the time of the case in an attempt to wear out the home owners. The cost, the time and the stress of this are immeasurable, and I hope that this new legislation will have a positive impact on people experiencing these types of problems.

With more and more people living in apartments, we need to make sure that they are built to a good standard and that they run well. When apartment buildings can have anywhere from a handful of residents to several hundred, we need to get the management of strata buildings right. I look forward to the upcoming legislative review of the Owners Corporation Act 2006, and I know that many others are also keen to get involved in the consultation process. The current system is leaving everyday owners to manage huge maintenance, rectification or legal projects, and this can be a recipe for disaster. We cannot expect that people who buy into strata buildings will necessarily have the skills to deal with the significant responsibilities of running an owners corporation. This can lead to poor maintenance. It can lead to delays or to issues in dealing with defects. It can lead to big problems that all owners are left to mop up through their fees. I have heard too often stories of people who are frankly not sufficiently competent for this work and end up with too much power. I have also heard of toxic or combative committees who refuse to listen to the wishes of other residents and who wield a lot of power and make decisions that are not necessarily supported by the resident community as a whole. It also means that other residents are not given the chance to get involved or they feel entirely powerless to take action to improve things within their building.

These problems are only further exacerbated when strata buildings have t defects. Having a toxic or ineffective owners corporation committee just makes everything harder and can lead to further deterioration of buildings. I think there is more work to be done to ensure that building inspections are done thoroughly and can identify defects before residents move in. Providing a one-page certificate that claims that the completed works generally appear satisfactory – which is from a report that was raised with my office about what was clearly a very defective building – is just not satisfactory. There is more work to be done to protect consumers when it comes to housing, but the intent of this bill and many of the provisions within it are sound. I believe it is being offered here before us to make things fairer and genuinely easier.

As I said earlier, implementation and resourcing will be key, and we will be watching closely to make sure that the commission works as intended. Further concerns that have been raised with me and my colleagues will be addressed, I hope, through the committee stage consideration of this bill. I commend the bill to the house.

Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (14:15): I am proud to stand and support this bill. It is incredibly important, particularly when you consider the importance of and particularly when you are talking about a home, whether people own or rent, when they are in their home, how important it is to them. We know that to ensure there are enough homes for Victorians, we need to ensure there is supply, and alongside that supply we have to ensure that supply is of quality. We have got to ensure that homes are of quality for Victorians, that no matter what stage of life people are in, they have quality homes they can live in. Whether they are single, whether they are in families, whether they are in retirement, a home is the centre of people’s lives. When you have a sound, quality home that you are living in, that is the place you can ground your life out of; where you can assure that you are healthy, when you can connect with health services; that you can get to work every day after a sound night’s sleep in that sound, quality home; and the fact that you can connect yourself and your family to education, from early education all the way through to TAFE, training and skills – which I will touch on later, how we are training the next generation of builders and people in the construction trades. It is absolutely at the centre of what we value and what we should all value.

This legislation is so important because it is simplifying what has been a complicated process for consumers. We are not talking about someone buying a toaster; we are talking about someone buying and living in a home, something that is not only economically but emotionally a massive investment for Victorians. When you talk to Victorians who have been on the wrong end or the bad end of a building construction, the emotional and economic pain can be great. We are going to create this one-stop shop for Victorians for when they are dealing with a builder and thereafter, this one-stop shop to simplify their needs at a time which can be so incredibly difficult when things go wrong.

Now, we should be clear to note that the majority of builders in Victoria do the right thing. The majority are passionate, considerate and put the effort and the detail into their work, and they prosper and they thrive delivering for Victorians, building the housing, commercial, industrial properties that we need right across this state. But for those that do not, it is right that they are held to account. Those that do not deliver on the work they are contractually obliged to deliver for their customers need to be held to account. The builders that deliver defective work to those customers that they are contractually obliged to deliver to should be held to account. Whether it is holding them to account or for the consumer’s experience in that process, bringing the current regulators in and making a one-stop shop for consumers is so vitally important.

The new Building and Plumbing Commission will supersede the Victorian Building Authority, the Victorian Managed Insurance Authority, the VMIA, and the domestic building – Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria, DBDRV. I am not even getting it out properly. That is the problem: everything is too confusing. Consumers come in and they do not know where they are meant to go when they identify a problem. Where are they meant to go for rectification of that problem? Where are they meant to go to if they get to the end of the path and they need insurance? They are going back and forth. By bringing it together, we are enabling the regulator to take the actions that are needed, whether that is mediation, whether that is rectification or whether that is insurance.

I worked in the building trade, as indeed did the President – not Acting President Broad, I do not think, but the President – and you can feel quality when you walk into a building. You have to go a layer beneath, but you can feel a quality build. You can see and feel it when builders take pride in the work they are doing. When that does not occur, we need them out.

I want to touch on a point that I am really proud of, which is the fact that we as a Labor government have invested in TAFE, because it is a really important part that you can skim over. We have invested in TAFE to ensure that the pipeline of trades and workforce is here for Victoria to deliver these quality builds. If you do not have that, you cannot get quality outcomes. We have invested in this – 27 TAFE campuses have been either built or upgraded. We have invested in the TAFE workforce, in the TAFE pathway and through the work that we are doing in high schools to support and identify that upcoming workforce rather than having a culture of not valuing the TAFE system, of not valuing trade certificates and of not encouraging young Victorians to be proud to come through the high school or secondary college pathway and go to a TAFE and get those qualifications. I think that is a consequence of last century when we devalued, when we privatised and when we cut pathways for the workforce and cut things like trade papers, which of course the Liberal–Nationals did away with. We are bringing those back so our tradespeople can travel not only Victoria and Australia but the world. And there are our school-based apprenticeships. That pipeline is so important, and I am really proud of that.

When those workers enter the workforce and work for builders there will be those that take pride in the work they do to deliver quality construction. But all builders must be of the knowledge that they have to deliver quality, and if they do not, they will be held to account. When consumers find themselves in a situation where they have issues, they must be able to quickly connect, communicate, identify and deal with issues before they blow out. Because when you talk to someone who has spent years trying to get issues in their home fixed, the emotional toll, as I touched on before, is as big as the economic toll for many of them. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect sometimes, particularly from the other side, on value. Value is getting that long-term, quality-built house that someone can live in and enjoy for decades to come, which does not have the maintenance costs of something that has not been built correctly and in which we can see lower energy costs. I just want to keep coming back to that word quality – it is absolutely key in the outcomes of the construction of these properties.

As I said at the start, I stand to support this bill and the outcomes that it will bring, to support the many builders and trades across Victoria that do the right thing and deliver quality-built homes for Victorians and to support the consumers that have builders looking to do wrong by them so that they have quick remedies and we can ensure that the industry continues to deliver the quality houses and the volume of houses we know that we need to house people in this state.

Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:24): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until later this day.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until later this day.