Revisiting ABC News’ ‘A Legacy of Defects’

Has much changed for strata building defect since the 2019 exposé …

In 2019 there was a flurry of news and activity around Australian strata building defects as research was published, the Opal Tower structural issues hit the news, and there was an exposé by the ABC.  So, let’s revisit this news to see if anything has changed.

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In August 2019 the ABC published this great visually interesting article about strata building defects in Australia called ‘A legacy of defects’ written by Sean Nicholls, Sharon O’Neill, and Naomi Selvaratnam.

In the article, they highlight how many new apartments were built in the 21st century so far [667,000] and the extent of defect found by the research by Dr. Nicole Johnston at Deakin University ‘An examination of Building Defects in Multi-Owned Properties’. 

And, as I’ve indicated in the article ‘7 + 3 Insights into 2020 Australian Strata Data’ there’s been another 282,448 new strata apartments built since 2019.

The ABC followed the article up with two Four Corners news reports as follows.

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So, there are now close to 1 million strata apartments that have been built since 2000 and the same things seem to be going wrong or worse in relation to defects in those buildings.  Plus, the combustible cladding subset of strata building defects is a completely new and arguably even more difficult problem.

So, despite the potential of some new initiatives that have just begun and/or are foreshadowed all the existing strata buildings still have to deal with their legacy building defects under the old, inadequate, and unsatisfactory system.  

In 2019 the ABC made the sarcastic comment in the article: ‘667,000 apartments in 18 years. What could go wrong?’. 

So, I’m now updating that quote that to say: ‘almost 1 million new apartments in 20 years, what more could go wrong?’

I’ll finish with another very apt quote in the article from Bronwyn Weir who co-authored the 2018 report ‘Building Confidence: Improving the effectiveness of compliance and enforcement systems for the building and construction industry across Australia’.

“There’ll be legacy issues for some time, and I suspect there’ll be legacy issues that we’re not even fully aware of yet.”

That might be the strata defects quote of the century.

May 27, 2021

Francesco …