Sydney home collapse: why the answer might be easing migration not tightening building regulation

The recent collapse of a house in Condell Park, Sydney should prompt a closer look at our immigration laws rather than the default response of more building regulations. When looking at photos of the house collapse in South-West Sydney, it doesn’t take long to see what the builder missed that was a likely cause, and perhaps I can share some insights into the bigger picture as to why I think it may have happened.

Building failure is always distressing, and the easiest lever for any politician, bystander or shock jock to pull is to blame the builder, shoddy industry practices and call for more regulation. Builders and tradesmen are easy targets, they often have less formal education and are commonly less engaged in media and more broadly seen as an underclass.

One critical aspect is that their mistakes are highly visible and lasting - but I’ve often wondered if the typical builder is any more prone to mistakes than the typical accountant, software engineer or lawyer. Most people assume the builder is more prone but I’m not sure empirical evidence bears this out. Since the Mascot Towers fiasco and a spate of construction failures we’ve had a steady ratcheting up of regulation - including some byzantine systems that arguably no one really understands - like the Design and Building Practitioner Act in NSW.

It’s easy for me to join the inevitable throng and say other builders are dodgy, this should never happen, and it would never happen on one of my projects, but these things can happen to even the best of us. As a licensed builder you do rely on people on your site making good decisions on your behalf and people are people - they make mistakes. Any builder that says that this couldn’t happen to them is lying or naïve. If you are building multiple projects, it’s simply not possible to know everything that happens on each site you are signing off on as a licensed builder. But there is a layer of protection built into our system - and ironically, it’s not extra red tape - it’s the extended construction team of qualified, every builder will tell you, that there just haven’t been enough team members in the past two years. Like a perverse game of musical chairs where there are always more chairs than there are people playing the game - in this case many many more chairs - empty chairs. The thing I know about being a builder in Sydney, is that getting anything built recently has been ridiculously difficult.

Supply chain issues come and go and then come again, price escalation is a huge risk that blows businesses up regularly - but the labour shortage has been a cancer eating the industry up - exacerbating price escalation, delaying projects and straining cash flows - compounding other problems. Simply put there have not been enough people to do all the work that’s been contracted.

A major contributor to the labour shortage for construction I argue are the skewed migration laws that mean that we invite people into the country who are awesome at passing tricky English exams but have no practical skills or construction experience. I understand the need for people to speak a functional level of English, but the test is reputedly so difficult that most Australians would not pass it. English speaking tradesmen on my site who are from Ireland or the UK would most likely not pass this test, but luckily for them they get a pass from sitting the exam as they are from an English speaking country. So, I can’t help feeling that this test is tinged with a layer of racism as well as skewed to favour a white collared workforce. I haven’t taken the exam, but I have spoken to enough people to know that it is a real and impenetrable barrier to entry for less educated aspiring migrants.

Skilled tradesmen are not trained to good at passing written language exams – but they are good at things like laying bricks safely, neatly and efficiently. This means that skilled and talented tradespeople go to work in other places like wealthy middle eastern countries where their skills and experience are valued, and we get people with limited practical skills and experience that are great at passing exams.

Skills aside, even if I want to employ unskilled staff and train them, I am competing against companies like Uber. The conversation goes like this - So I know you can work for Uber and work whenever you want, how long you want but I’ve got a better idea - how about you are here at 7am every day, work for 8 hours, do physical work in the sun or rain and then I’ll pay you less. The problem with Uber is that, driving is perceived not as work but as a novelty, particularly for younger people - contrasting sharply with physically demanding jobs like laying bricks. And brick laying is a demanding repetitive job but also an art that takes years to master and if there was one trade that has been in short supply in Sydney in the last 12 months it’s bricklayers.

We waited 4 months for bricklayers on one of our projects and tragically once the bricklayers were available, we went to organise delivery of the selected bricks (ordered months before) to find they were flooded somewhere in Victoria and the delivery was delayed - Welcome to construction in the 2020’s!

So why did this particular building - a house in South-West Sydney - fail? Like any accident probably a combination of factors but looking at the photo one tiny but critical element is obviously missing, wall ties. Wall ties are the glue that hold “brick veneers” together and without wall ties it’s not a veneer any more but 2 walls; an internal timber stud wall and an external brick wall. A brick wall in and of itself is not very stable - it relies on being tied to the timber stud wall to give it stability. So when I see what looks like a collapsed brick wall next to an almost pristine stud wall with no ties (look for the white vapour barrier with black writing on it), I think I have a good idea as to what may have happened and it was only a matter of time before it came crashing down - perhaps some moisture in the top of the wall, movement in the footing, an overweight possum - or a combination thereof. Put simply - it was an accident waiting to happen. The brick wall would have almost certainly been laid after the timber frame was installed so it would have been the bricklayer’s responsibility to ensure the brick wall was tied to the stud wall.

I can’t help wondering whether the builder - under pressure and contractual duress to deliver the project - did the best they could with what they had and perhaps a qualified and experienced bricklayer was just not available. Truthfully, if any builder was really honest about it, they would say - “that could have so easily been me had I been locked into an impossible contract and had a client that was less compromising”. I know these things are never simple, but I would argue that perhaps the biggest marginal gain in improving the quality of construction in NSW is not more red tape in construction compliance but just a little bit less red tape in one small aspect of our migration law to rebalance the focus on skills, qualification and experience and maybe enough English to live here happily and safely. It might be time to review the protectionist, racist and classist exam that most tradespeople born in this country would be unlikely to pass anyway.