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.