The story is one any homebuyer dreads, and in May of this year, it played out at the Skyview apartment complex in the Sydney suburb of Castle Hill.
Inspectors from New South Wales Fair Trading identified “structural issues that would require specialist engineering advice” in two of the five towers that make up the Skyview complex, one of Sydney’s biggest residential property developments. This resulted in a prohibition order on the towers, which has since been lifted.
The Castle Hill project is far from the only example of construction gone potentially wrong.
Flammable cladding on the Lacrosse tower in Melbourne led to a blaze in 2014. Cracks found in Sydney’s Opal Towers led to the evacuation of residents in 2018, while residents were evacuated from the city’s Mascot Towers in 2019. University of New South Wales researchers found that 26 per cent of a sample of 635 buildings in Sydney had documented evidence of defects.
It’s no surprise that public confidence in the construction industry is being tested.
“I think there is a real concern about building and construction quality in New South Wales and across the country at the moment,” said Engineers Australia Chief Engineer Jane MacMaster FIEAust CPEng.
“But it’s not a problem that one piece of the construction puzzle can fix alone, and so the wider building reform agenda is incredibly important for getting that whole system to work such that it is producing high quality buildings as an outcome.”
Engineers will have a critical role to play in any reforms, MacMaster said, but they aren’t the only people involved.
“We wholeheartedly support the New South Wales building reform agenda,” she said. “Engineers need to understand their role, what they’re accountable for, and also how their work interacts with other actors’ work in that system and ensure that they are performing their work to a very high standard.”
Building reform required
Baoying Tong, Engineers Australia’s Senior Manager, Building Reform and Projects, said Engineers Australia sees building reform as a “must”, and that engineers should have a big role to play.
“Engineers Australia has played a really important role — a pivotal role, I would say — in advising recent regulation changes, such as the [NSW] Design and Building Practitioners Regulation 2021,” Tong said.
“We actively provide feedback we hear from members to [the government]. Based on industry inputs, changes are made, and further guidelines are provided to help industry cope with the impact of regulations.”
Engineers Australia supports and advocates for mandatory inspections by engineers during construction and independent third-party review of projects.
“It’s quite important,” Tong said. “Imagine if you have a high risk-profile building. Automatically, you want to have major oversight on this building, and one way to do this is to have an independent body of engineers to do peer reviews, for example, on the structural design of the building.”
Engineers should also have a way to maintain engagement with projects after they have been completed, Tong suggested.
“Design engineers may not, because they finish the engagement at that point, have a chance to know what happens once a building gets handed over. What happens in one year, three years, 10 years?,” he said.
“I feel there has been a gap; and that is for engineers to go back to a building after the building’s been built and verify some of the assumptions they made during design. That way, they can learn and improve their practice.”
Maintaining professional standards
Both Tong and MacMaster emphasised the importance of professional standards.
“Our professional standards framework underpins our Chartered and NER credentials and is the vehicle through which we support our members with what they need to uphold high standards of engineering practice,” MacMaster said.
“That includes everything from the Code of Ethics through to practice protocols, through to the competency standards, which are undergoing a major review to ensure that they’re aligned with the International Engineering Alliance.”
Beyond NSW, as the national peak body of engineers, Engineers Australia is engaging in conversations about building reform with key stakeholders in other jurisdictions, including Victoria and the Northern Territory, and is supporting the national Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB).
Neil Savery, CEO of the ABCB, said the body is grateful for the input it receives from engineers. Responding to recommendations outlined in the 2018 Shergold and Weir Building Confidence Report (BCR), the ABCB established a dedicated BCR Implementation team and published a series of consultation papers.
“The really important thing that engineers provide us is often an evidence base,” he said. “We can talk about things, but what’s critical for us to be able to move on something is having an evidence base, and it’s often Engineers Australia who are able to do that.”
Savery believes that issues in the construction industry are not the results of the standards themselves, but the way they’re applied.
“Most people accept that Australia has a first rate code and a first rate set of construction standards for the purpose of building buildings,” he said.
“The work that has been undertaken over the last five years — pretty much since the Lacrosse building fire at the end of 2014 — has pointed to issues around the application of codes and standards, the culture of industry, the ability in some cases of people to understand and access those codes and standards.”
What will really help improve confidence in the industry is improved governance, practice, education and training.
“We need engineers who are at the leading edge of practice to engage in this process so that we at the ABCB in particular can benefit from the latest knowledge that people have when they are practising in the field,” Savery said.
Tong said that collaboration is the key to positive change. As an example, Engineers Australia aims to facilitate better communications between engineers and building certifiers by developing a joint guide with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, which would allow for deeper understanding between the roles.
“We are also developing another joint guideline for owners and for strata managers, to think about when they are worried about the quality of their buildings, and they want to engage someone like an engineer to help them get on top of the risk and find ways to remediate those risks,” he said.
MacMaster said she sees her primary responsibility as Chief Engineer as to ensure and uphold high standards of engineering practice within Australia.
“We have a large team dedicated to this,” she said.
“It is our highest priority, and we have a large body of work underway to strengthen our existing systems but also to make them future-proof. And we continue to work extensively across and collaboratively with various New South Wales building sector stakeholders to ensure that the systems that we have in place and those checks and balances will improve the quality of buildings that are built.”
We can regulate material quality and to a degree the process but the outcome is a building built to meet the design CRITERIA not just the design.
I came through in the days of certified Work as Executed” where the Engineer signed of at every stage. The Certifier system circumvents this responsibility and accountability. A building on the highway in Chatswood has a stressing point failure and those either side were showing cracking. These just happened to be the stressing that was done but not in certifiers sample I was told. But don’t worry the cladding will cover it up.
I walked past a building site again in Chatswood and it was obvious there was little responsibility being taken and we didn’t have to wait long before the pallet lift carrying mesh toppled over on top of an excavator – this accident going to happen was so obvious that I could capture it on video. Where was the responsibility – when we tested the H&S act in Darling Harbour (1970’s) and you pointed out a safety issue they would say “Red Hat” didn’t see it.
Do not try to regulate out responsibility and accountability it doesn’t work.
Manage the outcome not the process; if we had done that on the Newcastle Freeway we would not have had the longest cracked pavement, probably in the world.
The construction industry in Australia has been broken since at least the 70s (as far as my memory can go back) and there have been numerous reforms and enquiries in many States and nothing has changed to this day, so I could assume that the industry doesn’t want to be fixed and it finds ways to stop that from happening.
In the 70s my parents were caught by a shonky builder who skipped with their money and left a half-complete structure that was not built properly. The builder was registered and the resulting court case seeded a review of the builder’s licensing board in NSW. That builder was soon registered again and off doing the same shonky things.
It’s now more than 40 years later and I hear the exact same scenario playing out with home builders.
Why is this still happening?
completely agree and see the same issues from domestic homes to major construction projects. The current process where the responsibility for quality control is all about passing the buck. The certifiers in many cases are not doing the work required and the government departments are happy as they are no longer responsible.
The current system is also open to abuse possibly corruption etc as their is little to no cross checking of the sign off process.
I agree with everything said by Max Underhill, Lincoln Hudson and John David Wilson; but the building industry involves a lot of people other than engineers, including politicians (who don’t listen to advice from Engineers Australia), various tradesmen and non-technical persons having an interest in owning, investing, and managing buildings.
In the New Home Builders Australia facebook page, there are heaps of discussions on the poor performance of builders. In one recent post, an owner complained about the roofing structure not being strapped down properly and this attracted the following comment from a tradie “maybe it’s an industry who is overworked and understaffed?”
In the past, when we have municipal employed Building Surveyors and Inspectors, this is not likely to happen; but it does not make money – the single most important measure of KPI. So, privatisation of the building surveyor services was introduced and as John David Wilson said “The certifiers in many cases are not doing the work required and the government departments are happy as they are no longer responsible. The current system is also open to abuse possibly corruption etc as their is little to no cross checking of the sign off process. ” Currently, nobody is responsible for anything and the poor engineers is left carrying the problem child.
I put it to you that the engineering profession is heavily regulated by codes and standards but who is liable when the design complies with all the prevailing codes and standards at the time of design ?
In one of Engineers Australia’s webinars, I came to learn that ABCB is looking at regulating management of strata properties. My experience is with strata multi-storeyed apartments and it shows that industry engages heaps of people who cannot read drawings. In fact, many buildings don’t even have a set of drawings. How to manage a building without knowing where things are and why are they there ?
Of course, the simple answer is engage engineers but elsewhere, Engineers Australia is talking about shortage of engineering skills. Who caused this shortage ? Inadequate planning by our political masters.
Why would anyone want to pursue an engineering career when nobody is interested in looking after engineers by providing stable employment and not subjected to the boom and bust cycles ? Furthermore, why should engineers be subjected to litigation threats which is creating problems for engineers (refer “PI insurance in engineering: Beyond the rising premiums” by Chris Sheedy in Create 17 November 2021.
The problem is not with the engineering profession and it is time that the other interest groups take the blame and bear the financial losses.