From 'Wild West' to Gold Standard: How NSW's Building Commissioner Revitalised a $24 Billion Industry

There was a time not so long ago that the NSW building industry was referred to as the Wild West. One in 10 new residential apartment blocks in NSW had serious defects and there was no way to tell the good developers from the bad, as buyers crossed their fingers and hoped for the best when choosing a new apartment. As NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler joked, people buying new apartments had less consumer protection than someone buying a toaster or washing machine.

Add to that the scenes that played out on the nightly news of the thousands of residents evacuated from their Sydney Olympic Park apartment block on Christmas Eve 2018 as it threatened to collapse, followed by the 130 residents given hours to flee their Mascot apartment months later.

Into this scenario stepped the first ever NSW Building Commissioner, David Chandler. In just four short years, he has managed to bring a new transparency and confidence to the $24 billion industry. As one industry expert put it, “he managed to turn the Titanic around” not only because of the positive changes he brought to the industry, but the speed with which he did it.

“I remember back in the day the barbecue conversation was ‘You wouldn’t buy an apartment built in the last 10 years’,” says Urban Development Institute of Australia NSW CEO, Steve Mann.

“That was probably not right but there were enough problems for that to be a reasonable conclusion for consumers. We lost the confidence of consumers and no industry can afford to do that.

“So, although that was just true of the fringes (of the industry), we had to hone in on those fringes and reign it in.

“And that required very strong leadership.”

It is almost universally accepted in the building industry that one of the most positive changes in recent years is the introduction of the independent Construction Industry Rating Tool (iCIRT). It allows consumers buying a new or off-the-plan apartment in NSW to check the credentials of the company delivering the work.

So far, more than 200 companies have been rated through an independent and rigorous process, which experts claim is giving consumers the power to choose wisely, for the first time ever, who builds their home.

“Consumers are now asking for iCIRT ratings when visiting display units,” says Karen Stiles, director of the Owners Corporation Network of Australia. “And savvy real
estate agents are now focused on marketing rated developments.”

Fabrizo Perilli, the NSW president of the Property Council of Australia, calls iCIRT a “catalyst for change” in the multi-residential property industry.

“We are yet to see consumer confidence and the purchasing of apartments return to pre-COVID levels, however we anticipate this to improve as more and more developers and builders adopt the iCIRT rating,” he says.

“In the current market, trust, transparency and certainty are paramount for buyers and investors.” Perilli adds it’s also an effective way for developers and builders to differentiate themselves from their peers when communicating to purchasers who are rightly seeking an additional layer of certainty and peace of mind.

NSW chapter president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Adam Haddow, says Chandler’s cleaning up of the industry benefits not only consumers, but all elements involved in the building process.

“From an architect’s point of view, the checks and balances that Chandler has been able to put in has reigned in some of the challenges we felt with the construction of apartments,” the director of architecture firm SJB says. “Before Chandler came in, a lot of things like materials could be swapped out during the construction process and we had little control.

“He brought in more constraints over what can be changed, so you just can’t swap brickwork for aluminium, for example. Most new apartments in NSW are sold off the

“plan and consumers commit to buying an apartment on the info provided during the marketing phase. Now there’s more consumer confidence that they will get the product they committed to.”

While Chandler’s four-year role was due to expire in August, the Minns Government has encouraged him to stay on until the new Building Commission is established by the end of 2023.

The Building Commission was a Minns election promise to ensure quality building and an increase of supply to stem the ongoing housing crisis that has dominated public debate in recent months.

Despite the positive changes, Mann says the apartment sector is “in turmoil” in terms of supply. At its peak in 2018/19 new apartment builds represented almost half of all new housing stock, delivering around $33,000 apartments a year. Mann says that number is down to around 10,000, highlighting a crisis in housing shortage.

“We have a whole lot of economic challenges,” he says.

“There has been layer upon layer of challenges, through the COVID years, the financing of these big projects and construction costs have become more difficult.

“But with the deep affordability challenge we’ve got, apartments must be the big future, it has to be.”

President of the Strata Community Association of NSW, Stephen Brell, agrees.

“The government has predicted NSW needs 30,000 strata lots per year just to keep pace with current demand and given that we are falling behind, that is a challenge for the government and for the planners,” Brell says.

“With affordability, in Sydney in particular, being very expensive the Minns Government has a focus on medium-density living, particularly around the major transport hubs of Sydney. As Sydney is bounded by national parks to the north and south, mountains to the west and the ocean to the east, the only way is to go up.”

Brell adds the future of the apartment sector in NSW looks bright because Chandler is not only looking to improve the quality of new builds, but also to maintain the existing stock.

“By 2030, 60 percent of strata schemes will be more than 30 years old so we need to focus attention on existing buildings, of properly maintaining them,” Brell says.

“We have to make the industry resilient going into the future.”

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

From ‘Wild West’ to Gold Standard: How NSW’s Building Commissioner Revitalised a $24 Billion Industry

Buyer confidence returns to the multi- residential market as certification kicks in

Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.