A housing crisis nobody talks about

THERE is a massive housing crisis in Australia and everyone is running for cover as this ticking time bomb threatens to explode.

I’m not talking about a shortage of homes or an oversupply, or the homeless, or worsening affordability.

I’m talking about the complete breakdown of government regulation and the greed-driven failure of the building sector to provide safe housing.

We have builders with fake licences, inferior plumbing fixtures, dodgy imported electrical wiring, useless building guarantees, flammable cladding, heaving concrete slabs, false documents, leaky building syndrome and estates built around toxic waste dumps.

What is going on? Anyone buying a new home, high-rise or in a housing estate is taking their lives in their own hands. We have tens of thousands of people living in unsafe conditions and families financially shackled to these housing disasters.

People’s dreams are in ruin, with their biggest financial asset in tatters, and everyone is turning their back. This breakdown in the building sector is also a breakdown in society, as the law is ignored and not policed. Home builders, surveyors, regulators and the government have their fingers in their ears – la la la la, not my fault.

We have a systemic breakdown of regulation across the government and building sector. We already have plenty of good laws in place, both state and federal, but no one is enforcing them.

In some cases only 3 per cent of homes are inspected.

And the ambition is to increase this to 10 per cent! That still means 90 per cent won’t get checked.

Those odds easily support continuing to buy cheap products, install unsafe fixtures and take risks with people’s money and lives.

Just look at the merry dance still going on about replacing non-compliant, highly flammable, lifethreatening cladding from the high-rise homes of thousands of people.

Governments and property developers have always had a very cosy relationship. Planning approvals make or break millionaire developers. So does enforcing building regulations.

It is increasingly clear that governments are not providing proper funding to allow the regulators to do their job. I suspect this is not a coincidence but corruption.

In high-rise or housing estates, buyers and households are getting done over at a rate of knots.

Take all the developers who have been allowed to sell new homes in Melbourne’s west without a mention of the massive commercial dump being built beside them.

For almost 20 years the government and its agencies have let these tip plans go undocumented on contracts of sale.

Or consider the dodgy concrete slabs, the properties being built on risky soil or near old landfill. The polystyrene cladding that lets the water leak through and rot out the timber framing behind it, the homes that don’t have proper fire proofing, faulty fixtures and dodgy wiring.

Buying a new home is often a nightmare, not a dream. Now that’s a housing crisis!