20 AUGUST 2019
The ACT Government was on the right track by putting property developers in its sights with a potential licensing scheme but it needed to go further if it was serious about fixing the building quality issue in the ACT, according to the ACT Owners Corporation Network.
President Gary Petherbridge, commenting after Tuesday night’s Four Corners report Cracking Up that highlighted Canberra’s decade-old Elara apartments debacle, said the issues started with developers, who needed to be called to account, but licensing alone would not be enough. He said the Government needed to start excluding developers who they knew to be questionable from land purchases. “If they were serious they could turn around and say, ‘we don’t want to sell these properties to people who are proven to have some suspicious behaviour’,” he said.
“So that way you could start to put the pressure on. Unfortunately, that means the Government might not get as good a price for these places as they want, because they’ll be limiting the market to those who are credible and won’t have any actions going against them.” Mr Petherbridge said self-regulation in the industry had clearly failed and while acknowledging the efforts of Building Quality Minister Gordon Ramsay and Access Canberra to clean up the mess, he believed tougher laws and a return to former regime practices were needed.
> Read the full article at the-riotact.com
Ian Bushnell