The Albanese government has set a target to build 1.2 million homes over five years, requiring an unprecedented volume of high-rise apartment developments in our major cities.
However, there were numerous defects and issues with construction quality during the high-rise boom of the previous decade.
These issues were summarised in a 2019 Four Corners investigation entitled “Cracking Up”, which uncovered a systemic failure to regulate and protect the buying public, even in the face of repeated warnings.
“We’ve got a real problem here. It’s systemic and it’s infecting lots of buildings across the landscape, in all parts of the country. It’s very clear”, one building analyst told Four Corners in 2019.
“I have never seen a building that isn’t defective in some way. I know it’s my job, but even just walking around in public, I notice these things”, a forensic engineer added.
A strata study conducted by the NSW government in November 2023 found that 53% of newly registered buildings had “serious defects”.
The proportion of severe defects reported to the regulator in 2023 had also more than doubled since the 2021 survey.
A separate study by the Strata Community Association NSW found that waterproofing was the most common major issue, followed by fire safety.
“We have what is now you know, a systemic failure that is quite difficult to unravel”, Building construction lawyer, Bronwyn Weir, warned in 2022.
“Thousands and thousands of apartments have serious defects in their buildings”, she added. “Some of these buildings could potentially be a write-off”.
Weir followed up last year, warning that accelerating construction to meet the government’s housing target would inevitably result in corners being cut, poorer quality and defects.
“On current estimates, 50% of what will be built will have serious defects”, she said.
Indeed, Torrens University academics published an article in The Conversation last week noting that “the Australian construction industry has long been facing a crisis of serious defects in apartment buildings”.
The article claimed that “the poor quality of apartment buildings is often the result of deeply entrenched patterns of unprofessional behaviour across the industry”, which “often arise as professionals face pressures to cut costs in an industry notorious for its low profit margin”.
The authors warned that “as the Albanese government fast-tracks its five-year plan to build 1.2 million dwellings”, the prevalence of serious defects in apartment buildings “will likely worsen”.
The reality is that the federal government’s mass immigration policy is not conducive to high-quality construction.
So long as the federal government continues importing hundreds of thousands of migrants into Australia every year, necessitating the construction of vast volumes of dwellings, corners will be cut, and construction quality will suffer.
Instead of repeating the mistakes of last decade’s high-rise boom, the government should cut net overseas migration significantly, so that the building industry can prioritise quality of construction over quantity.
