Two decades of deregulation have left Australia’s building industry awash with non-compliant building materials, its construction practices poorly policed, and thousands of high-rise apartments and other buildings at risk from tragic fire, experts have warned.

A Senate inquiry into non-conforming building materials – which began in 2015 – has heard scathing assessments of the building industry’s regulatory architecture, with calls for an aggressive overhaul.

The inquiry was holding its first public hearing since the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in west London a month ago.



It heard there could be “thousands” of buildings in Australia built with non-compliant material, including aluminium composite cladding of the style implicated in the Grenfell fire.



Travis Wacey from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union told senators the union was so concerned about the use of suspect cladding it had asked its members to resist installing it in a non-compliant manner.



He said the product had been used extensively in the industry for the past 25 years, and called for tougher restrictions to be placed on the importation of the cladding.

He also reminded senators the Fire Protection Association had previously warned the issue was a “time bomb” with “tens of thousands of apartment buildings nationwide at risk” because of the widespread misuse of aluminium cladding products.

Adam Dalrymple, the deputy chief officer of Victoria’s Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board, agreed there was a problem.

He said the total number of at-risk buildings was “probably unquantifiable” but there was “no doubt there’ll be an excessive number”.

He said the Victorian Building Authority’s audit of 170 high-rise buildings in Melbourne’s CBD in the wake of the “near-miss” fire in the Lacrosse building in Melbourne’s Docklands in 2014, found 51% had used materials that were not compliant with Australian building codes, which require that external cladding minimise the risk of fire.

He said it was easy to see how significant the problem could be nationwide.

“From 170, just in the city of Melbourne, only looking at three classes of building when you’ve got 10 different building classes, and we’re only looking at places where people sleep, you know, it’s not hard to extrapolate that there’s going to be a number of buildings that won’t comply across the whole of Australia,” he warned.

Neil Savery, the general manager of the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), said the industry had changed dramatically in recent decades, with deregulation and globalisation, making it harder to ensure buildings were built to certain standards.

He said a sophisticated performance-based code of regulation was introduced in the early 1990s, which needed highly qualified people to understand how it works.

He said private certification was incrementally introduced at the same time, and the industry underwent a process of deregulation, “or a reduction in regulatory requirements around things like mandatory inspections”, he said.

“And at the same time as all of that’s happening, the world is changing around us. We’ve got global supply chains. We’ve got multinational companies operating.

“You put all of that together and I don’t think we’ve necessarily come back and said: ‘How is that working?’ We set this up thinking of a particular set of circumstances but the circumstances are very different 20 years on.”

Labor senator Kim Carr said that process of deregulation had led to unsafe buildings.

“What we’re trying to establish is: who’s responsible for that?” Carr said. “If this is a product of deregulation then surely we’ve got to start to re-regulate?”

Savery said the ABCB had already recommended to state building ministers that an “expert review” needed to be established to consider how much circumstances had changed.

“Someone’s actually got to sit down and review this,” he said.