Sydney's dodgy buildings due to 17 years of inaction

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Opinion

Sydney's dodgy buildings due to 17 years of inaction

By Harvey Grennan

The problems with the Opal apartment tower at Sydney Olympic Park have raised the issue of building quality in NSW. It is not the first time.

Seventeen years ago I initiated and co-wrote an investigative series for the Herald called Towers of Trouble as the paper’s local government writer. It was about dodgy new apartment buildings.
The series led to a parliamentary inquiry into building quality and many subsequent changes to the law and some new regulatory bodies.

But the one thing the state government steadfastly refused to do was address the principal finding of the series. That the system of private certification of new buildings introduced in 1998 was a conflict of interest. Developers chose and paid their own private certifier. They still do.

The government did set up a Building Professionals Board in 2007 to police private certifiers but it took years for the BPB to be given any real teeth. For years after Towers of Trouble I continued to write about private certifiers approving buildings that did not comply with the development application – sometimes whole storeys were illegally added - or buildings with multiple serious defects. Penalties for breaches were laughable.

The Herald was, to say the least, courageous in giving me approval to proceed with the series but it asked of me one thing. Just write in detail about one developer so that only one would sue and be generic about the rest. We picked Meriton, the biggest fish in the pond and the Herald’s biggest advertiser. As I say, a courageous decision. No one sued. And Meriton was far from the only or worst offender.

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There were cases of big developments where the strata committees would not talk because of fear of harming unit values. In one case a shocking building report on a very “prestigious” inner west development was locked in a safe so that strata searches by prospective buyers could not access it.

A report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre in 2012 found that 85 per cent of apartments built since 2000 have major defects; another report in 2015 found that the average cost of rectifying faults in new apartment buildings was 27 per cent of the original construction cost. The most common – and most expensive problem – is faulty waterproofing where tiled areas have to be ripped up and replaced, often costing strata bodies millions of dollars and individual owners tens of thousands.

The Towers of Trouble series was nominated as a finalist for a prestigious Eureka Award but did not prevail. It turned out that two of the panel judges for that category represented an institution that was criticised in the report. In those days industry bodies - not the government – accredited private certifiers. Conflict of interest was contagious.

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Recently I used a private certifier myself to build a carport - something I thought I would never do. But the local council took months to approve the DA and when I asked how long it would take to issue a construction certificate they would not give me a time frame. This was for a carport!
So it’s pretty clear even to me why the government will not walk away from private certification. It would slow down development if left to councils.

The 36-storey Opal Tower was completed in August.

The 36-storey Opal Tower was completed in August. Credit: Nick Moir

Who or what is to blame for the building issues at the Opal Tower is yet to be established. But one of the features of the certification system – private or council - is that a certifier ticks off a particular trade if that contractor supplies what is called a “certificate of compliance” for their work – the certifier does not have to check the work themselves, just tick off the paperwork. It is called “self certification” – trades are their own policemen. Only one of the plethora of such certificates required for a major project has to be dodgy for a building to have major problems down the track.

In October, the Minister for Better Regulation, Matt Kean, admitted for the first time for any NSW government that “it’s ridiculous that developers can choose their own certifiers” when releasing an options paper on how certifiers are appointed to projects.

Government-appointment by panel or a rotating list of certifiers so they are appointed randomly to developers is the obvious answer to the system’s inherent and sometimes corrupt conflict of interest but both sides of politics have resisted the obvious for two decades so don’t hold your breath. Developers have always had the government’s ear.

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Harvey Grennan is a former Herald local government reporter.

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