Engineers say changes are years overdue and obvious before Opal or Mascot Towers evacuations

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Australia’s engineers say the recommendations from Opal Tower have still not been acted on, as the Mascot Towers apartment buildings in Sydney continued to sink further into the ground this week.

An emergency report into the cracked Opal Tower was completed in February by prominent university deans of architecture after the brand-new building was dramatically evacuated in December.

Five recommendations were handed down to improve building quality, reform certification and prevent it from happening again.

On Wednesday the government’s minister for better regulation, Kevin Anderson, said he had just released a discussion paper calling for “stakeholder input” on reforms that included many of the Opal recommendations.

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But Engineers Australia say the changes are years overdue and were obvious before the cracks emerged in Opal Tower and in Mascot Towers this month.

The main recommendation of the Opal Tower report was to create an official registry of engineers who would then be used to provide independent third-party certification of designs and on-site inspections during construction.

Jonathan Russell from Engineers Australia said the recommendations from Opal Tower were in fact already recommended a year earlier – in February 2018.

“The Opal Tower recommendations of February 2019 are largely reflected in the Building Ministers Forum [BMF] report of a year earlier. This includes a recommendation to require engineers to be registered to practice.

“When calculating the time to take action, the starting point is February 2018, not February 2019,” he said. “The real question is if there has been any progress on implementing the BMF report recommendations of February 2018. And the answer is, not nearly enough.”

Russell said many members of the public assumed wrongly that the engineers register already existed.

“The general public and home investors have simply assumed that engineers must be registered to practice in NSW. That is not the case – anyone can call themselves an engineer.”

Mehreen Faruqi, a federal Greens senator for NSW and former civil engineer, said the registry was “common sense” and “should have been done years ago”.

“These reforms are urgently needed. As a professional civil engineer, I think it is pretty ridiculous we still have a situation where there is no register.

“Engineering associations have been calling for things like a registry of qualified engineers for years.”

The Opal Tower report in February also made other recommendations: the creation of an open repository for certifications (“to raise the accountability of certification processes”) and the creation of a Building Structure Review Board.

On Wednesday, Anderson said the government was “committed to getting important reforms right”.

The discussion paper, called Building Stronger Foundations, contained four reforms.

As well as the registry of engineers, it floats the introduction of an industry-wide duty of care, which would allow a homeowner to seek compensation if a building developer or builder had been negligent, and the appointment of a building commissioner.

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A duty of care had previously been recommended by the Owners Corporation Network, who advocate for homebuyers.

“The problem with building is that it is not always clear who owes a duty of care to who,” their chairman Phillip Gall told Guardian Australia earlier in June.

Anderson said people now had the “opportunity to provide feedback” to the ideas.

“The legislation will implement many of the recommendations from the Lambert and Shergold-Weir reports into the building industry, and now we want to hear from industry and the wider community to help finalise the legislation.

“We are committed to getting these important reforms right and ensuring they are developed in close consultation with the industry and community.”