REFORM MAY BE TOO LATE

IT just isn’t good enough. Another building company has gone down, leaving 133 creditors out of pocket for a total of $3.4 million.

How this can keep happening beggars belief. With a long and sorry history of subcontractor hardship whenever builders or developers fail, it is appalling this can still occur in 2017 despite repeated calls for legislation to protect tradies and the public.

Earlier this year Housing and Public Works Minister Mick de Brenni’s office revealed up to a quarter of bankruptcies came from the building industry, providing “clear evidence there’s a problem that needs to be fixed’’.

Up to 80,000 small subcontracting businesses are in the building game across Queensland.

That is an astounding slice of not only the construction sector but also the small business sector – too much to be at the mercy of larger players when they go bust, leaving subbies and families to struggle with debt while failed operations seem able to pop up in new form to start again.

The multiplier effect of failure can be devastating. Subbies can’t pay their own workers and suppliers. Families can’t pay bills. Businesses from the local hardware to the corner store suffer the fallout, and on it goes as others feel the pain too. There is an urgency to this.

Mr de Brenni has said new laws will be introduced to ensure every subcontractor is paid at the same moment a developer is paid. Government reforms include trust account-style project bank accounts (PBAs) for public and private sector projects in excess of $1 million to ensure tradies are paid.

The move to introduce PBAs follows a series of building industry collapses in the past year that cost subbies hundreds of millions of dollars.

The PBAs should be a saviour and the Government has vowed they will be in place by January 1, but peak industry organisations including Master Builders Queensland have lobbied against them, disputing they will provide payment security and arguing they will increase costs and red tape.

And so tradies wait for the reforms they hope will protect them. The public waits too. Why? Mr de Brenni has said legislation is coming. For the subbies caught in the latest collapse, it may be too late.