Fear and loathing is one way to describe the background noise of what might happen to the National Construction Code as it goes through a review process. Another way is excitement.
And it’s all just in time for our 31 March evening debate at Arup’s Sydney offices (5 pm) where the NCC and other rating tools will be put under the spotlight to see if they are still fit for purpose.
It’s flagged as the Big Debate, but to be honest we expect as many views as there are panellists. The vote by the audience is really a trope or device to flesh out the critical issues at stake under a highly structured agenda. But it also includes time for a QandA session from the audience that judging by the people who’ve already bought tickets get a little wild.
Just this week we received missives from the Housing Industry Association (which will be represented on the night by Simon Croft) that it wants a complete “knock down and rebuild. The language is in perfect keeping with the nature of the industry it’s in. But it also reflects the kind of emotion and frustration we hear from a lot of people about the NCC – and other rating tools – which prodded us to hold the debate in the first place.
The NCC, says the HIA, is too rigid, too burdensome, the standards too expensive, too hard to follow. Just too much of everything.
It also blames the NCC at least partly for the poor productivity in construction in recent times.
What will make it all better it says is simplifying code provisions, moving to five year amendment cycle, free Australian Standards, reduced “unnecessary regulatory burden” and clearer pathways for adoption of AI, innovation and modern construction methods.
Nowhere of course is energy efficiency mentioned as a priority in a heating climate, nor the inclusion of adequate access provision for people with disability.
In fact, you sense that these two items might be part of the “unnecessary regulatory burden” that’s mentioned.
We know changing the code right now means a mandatory Regulatory Impact Statement, which was demanded by the more conservative elements of the industry we understand, but which is now a provision that has come back to bite the reformers.
A RIS can cost $100,000 in fees for consulting economists and in a time of cutbacks to the Australian Building Codes Board which administers the code, hard to fund.
Architects say some of the solutions for safety issues simply cause other problems. Architect Shaun Carter of Carter Williamson tells us in a podcast to be dropped soon that the maximum allowed opening in an apartment window essentially deprives the place of ventilation.
He also says that the standards need some radical overhauls to deal with the new world of extreme climate. Standard guttering for instance is no longer fit for purpose when rain can be so heavy that water runs vertically upwards.
At the Property Council the boffins there are likewise concerned but about the things that worried them from day dot: the lack of harmonisation in the code across the country. This matters to them because large developers tend to work across multiple jurisdictions.
Thing is the states have gone a tad rogue. We see building ministers cheerfully posing for happy snaps after the latest NCC meeting only to go back to their states and almost immediately cave to pressures from local housing or building lobbies telling them to defer/delay implementation. Especially when it’s to do with energy efficiency as we saw in South Australia and Tasmania and mooted in Queensland.
In a note to his members Property Council chief executive Michael Zorbas said the NCC was being eroded by state politicians.
“Adoption timelines, interpretations, overlaid non code requirements and enforcement increasingly differ across states and territories,” Zorbas said.
“For example, planning controls, plumbing regulations and other state-based frameworks can introduce additional and conflicting technical expectations, even where the NCC should be the primary standard.”
And there’s the complexity. The volume of pages for the NCC had grown from an initial 93 pages to 900 pages currently, he said.
The there is the absence of “deemed to satisfy” provisions that have been replaced with performance based solutions which add cost time and risk, Zorbas adds.
Another big push, according to one industry source we spoke to on Wednesday is to make the standards free. This makes sense to us. But this guy said someone’s got to pay for the standards even if it’s the taxpayer.
Here is one public good that we think the taxpayer should probably stump up for. Especially if it helps more Opal Tower style disasters occurring, not to mention the bevvy of poor building work that ruin lives but remain underreported thanks to the short attention span in our media these days.
Brendan Coates to head up housing delivery at Treasury
But how Treasury is expected to sort out a mess that’s been decades in the making is anyone’s guess. “What does Treasury know about building?” mused one commentator? Or housing, actually?
It’s pretty clear that politically the building crisis is seen as a close cousin of the housing crisis. And probably why the nerdiest people in the country have been tasked with this “clarification we need to have” with the NCC.
Right on cue on Thursday we learned that housing policy expert Brendan Coates from the Grattan Institute has been snapped up for a new role in Treasury to lead housing supply.
Coates is a proud YIMBY and we confess this appointment stokes our fears of further incursion into the political corridors of the abundance cult of which that Treasurer Jim Chalmers so enamoured. What’s so irksome is the belief that more supply is the answer to more affordable housing.
The thinking is straight form of Economics 101 – more of anything brings the price down. Maybe, usually, but it doesn’t quite work that way with housing. What is true is that if you build enough shitty houses their prices will definitely come down. Check out Melbourne with its 8000 little airless apartments completed and failing to find buyers.
The good news is that Coates does see the value in slashing the capital gains tax discount and reforming negative gearing.
He told The Australian Financial Review that the two tax rules created “strong incentives for debt-financed and speculative investment, which undermines income tax integrity”.
See the note we included this week on Allegra Spender’s white paper on tax reform.
Interestingly Coates said the change should not be grandfathered.
And we love that he said that the government could use the extra revenue to build more social housing.
It’s enough to make us overlook the cult thingy.