If you’re thinking of building or renovating, you’d better study up. You may find yourself jumping through hoops to negotiate a host of new building regulations, writes Harvey Grennan.
Every year, builders are confronted with another raft of planning and building rules to follow. It's a nightmare for the industry and involves added cost for the consumer.
The residential building code runs to 700 pages, plus thousands of pages more for the 140 associated Australian standards. You might imagine that these legislated standards, like other laws, would be freely available. Not so; it will cost you around $3000 for all the documents, and let's hope you have a PhD to translate them. Even council building surveyors struggle and often give wrong advice.
Recently, for example, a rural council in NSW demanded the installation of a fire door with specific safety ratings as required in the Building Code of Australia (BCA) for a retail development. No such door was commercially available but the council insisted. After hours of research, the builder found another section of the BCA that exempted that requirement. No-one in the council was aware of it.
In another part of the BCA, overflow standards for gutters are listed as advisory. On the next page, however, they are deemed mandatory. And so it goes, for 700 pages plus appendices.
And the BCA is just the rule book for safe construction. Then there's a raft of state, territory and council standards on zoning, stormwater, bushfires, energy savings, effluent disposal, overshadowing, site coverage, heritage, setbacks, building waste, occupational health and safety, traffic-control plans, endangered species, etc. The list is long and getting longer.
Local councils often have to refer development applications to state agencies for their 'concurrence'. In NSW, this adds an average of 54 days to the time taken to process those development applications. Councils themselves give neighbours the right to object to the most minor alterations, such as installing a skylight. Some neighbours will take advantage of this, perhaps as payback for previous disputes, which can lead to long delays.
Many of the changes are laudable from a public-policy standpoint, as they are aimed at higher building quality or sustainability. The costs of these reforms, however, are not borne by the lawmakers who legislate them. They are borne by the homeowners who are building or renovating. When you are paying for higher standards, it would be easier to stomach if those same lawmakers did not keep harping on about housing affordability and streamlining the planning system. If only... Building and renovating never get easier, only more complex and expensive.
The problem with regulation is simply the rapid increase in the volume of it, "which means lengthy and costly delays," says Harley Dale, Chief Economist for the Housing Industry Association.
Tony McNamara, NSW President of the Planning Institute of Australia, agrees. "Council officers and private certifiers are seeing a stream of changes and amendments to planning and building legislation. This is difficult even for skilled assessment officers to keep up with, let alone for mums and dads."
Dale points to last year's decision that all new homes must move from satisfying a five-star to a six-star energy rating. "Constructing more environmentally friendly housing is an important goal," he says, "but the decision ignored the fact that there are some parts of Australia where technically you can't build a six-star home, due to climatic conditions."
Dale offers some more examples: "In Victoria and South Australia, regulations state that walls are to be built on or within 150mm of the boundary. Someone didn't do their maths: a standard fascia and gutter is more than 150mm wide. In order to place a wall further than 150mm you require a report and consent from council, which means more time and money. In some jurisdictions, council consent is required to move a fence from inside your boundary to the boundary."
When NSW introduced the BASIX energy- and water-saving requirements, the cost of building a home rose by as much as 10 per cent. Project builders responded by reducing the size of homes. The BCA recently introduced another raft of sustainability requirements nationally. "You could predict that house sizes will drop again," says Angus Kell, a spokesperson for building advisory service Archicentre.
While sustainability measures are good for the planet, some 'reforms' are of doubtful value, confusing or even contradictory. In NSW, there's a whole bureaucracy to stop rainwater exiting an allotment (at the owner's expense) for fear of nutrients entering a waterway, even if there's no waterway within cooee. There are often downright silly outcomes. For example, one authority may instruct you not to clear any vegetation to protect biodiversity, while another tells you to bring in the bulldozer to guard against bushfire. You're required to comply with both, which is, of course, impossible.
The Property Council of Australia says new housing codes giving quick planning approvals for straightforward house plans in some states had alleviated the problem of regulations gone mad. But even fast-track codes can be so technically driven and restrictive that the majority of people would not be able to understand the process, says McNamara. "This usually means they need to engage and pay a person with a strong understanding of the planning process to assist in the preparation of documents."
A third of all home renovations, says Kell, are done by owner-builders or do-it-yourselfers. "I guarantee that they don't have a copy of the BCA tucked under their arm," he says. "You used to be able to look up the BCA in the local library but many libraries don't carry it any more. It's no surprise that of the 20,000 pre-purchase inspections we carry out each year, nearly 30 per cent show signs of illegal work."
