A new ABC report claims “thousands and thousands of apartments have serious defects in their buildings” in what experts have described as an “absolute catastrophe”.
Images supplied to the ABC reveal extensive black mould spreading from wall cavities into insulation, timber and plaster across Melbourne apartment complexes.
Building regulation consultant, Bronwyn Weir, claims the problem is widespread and the damage bill is often significant.
“It is an absolute catastrophe because if there’s significant mould issues, the cost to rectify might well exceed the value”, Weir said.
“Some of these buildings could potentially be a write-off”.
A lack of proper regulation and oversight had created a “perfect storm”, according to Weir.
“We have what is now you know, a systemic failure that is quite difficult to unravel”.
“Certainly, thousands and thousands of apartments that have serious defects in their buildings”.
“So [the problem] is enormous,” she said.
The situation is similar across the rest of the nation.
Research released in October 2021 by the Strata Community Association NSW found nearly four in 10 new apartment buildings in NSW have serious defects.
A NSW parliamentary inquiry also found that building defects are widespread:
HAGAR COHEN: Our major cities have been transformed by the high-rise apartment boom over the past decade.
SHADY ESKANDER, CHAIRMAN, OPAL TOWERS OWNERS CORP.: Sydney is going up, it is not going out and more and more people are going to be moving into apartments.
HAGAR COHEN: But as demand for apartment living surged, major cracks began to surface in the state’s building standards…
DAVID SHOEBRIDGE, NSW BUILDING COMMISSIONER: What our inquiry found was that we need to reverse this deregulation, we need to stop this trend towards privatisation of the oversight of the building industry.
What we’ve noticed particularly in the last five years is the effect of that is now being felt in a wave of defects across particularly the multilevel apartment industry.
The high-rise debacle is the direct result of the failure of policy, which deregulated the building industry and eliminated the need for qualified inspectors to ensure these structures were built correctly.
The situation was made worse by 15 years of hyper immigration pre-pandemic, which required building tens-of-thousands of extra homes every single year, thus leading to speed over quality and compromised building standards.
With the Albanese Government opening the immigration floodgates, and record immigration expected, there is the clear and present danger that standards will again be compromised in a bid to build as many low-quality apartments as possible to house the ballooning population.
Clearly, the Albanese Government’s mass immigration policy will exacerbate the problems and will result in our cities being plastered with more defective high-rise apartments.
