I contribute to debate on the Building Legislation Amendment Bill 2023. The bill amends the Home Building Act 1989 to introduce new powers for the building regulator. The bill is designed to progress a range of reforms to strengthen consumer protections for home owners, ensuring accountability for unsafe building products, and to provide necessary powers to address practitioners, noncompliant work and poor behaviour. This in turn will improve transparency, accountability and quality of work in the building and construction industry in New South Wales.

The bill aligns with the Government's commitment to tackling the housing supply crisis after a decade of inaction that allowed the quantity of homes to come at the expense of quality of homes. The NSW Building Commissioner will have the power to enter any apartment or freestanding home in New South Wales to uncover defects before completion of buildings. The NSW Building Commission will also get more than 400 dedicated staff and a $24 million funding boost. This will allow it to scale up to ensure quality buildings are being delivered in New South Wales, many of which are being built in my electorate of Leppington. Supercharging the regulator's powers will ensure that, as the State meets the urgent need for more homes, buyers can be confident about the quality of home they are buying. These measures are further supported by the Minns Government's commitment to develop a pattern book endorsing housing designs for low‑rise and mid‑rise buildings that will also enhance the continuity of quality standards across new developments.

The bill will expand proactive enforcement powers for the building regulator in class 1 low-rise residential buildings. It will impose obligations and accountability on all persons in the building product supply chain to ensure the design, manufacture, supply and installation of safe and compliant building products. It will give the Secretary building product warnings, product use bans and product recall powers to ensure quick responses to the use of unsafe or non-conforming building products. It will clarify the framework for 10-year building warranty insurance to increase consumer protections. The bill will also enable immediate suspension of key building design and certifier practitioners' authorities where allowing them to continue to work would pose a serious risk to public safety consumers or other businesses. Finally, it will ensure existing data- and information-sharing arrangements continue to support the NSW Building Commission when it is established.

Consultation on the reforms has been extensive. In August 2022 the Department of Customer Service publicly consulted on a wide range of building reforms, including the reforms proposed in this legislation. Stakeholders were invited to provide comment on the draft bill and accompanying regulatory impact statements. The consultation received well over 1,000 submissions and 177 submissions from consumers, tradespeople and industry associations, and there was broad support for the reforms contained in the bill. Separate public consultation was carried out in August, September and October of this year on the proposal to introduce mandatory 10-year serious defects insurance for all new apartment buildings. The proposals contained in the bill are separate from that consultation and are intended to enable the ongoing voluntary intake of serious defects insurance.

Last Sunday, I was pleased to have the Premier, Minister Chanthivong and the Building Commissioner at Leppington to mark the expected passage of this legislation. We were at HomeWorld Leppington. I think many people are familiar with HomeWorld—there are now five; one of the newer ones is at Leppington—where some of the better builders in our industry get together to display homes and give consumers a choice in one area. One of the houses we inspected was by reputable builder Eden Brae Homes—the first builder to receive certification on the quality of its class 1 residential buildings.

As I said, my electorate houses a lot of new subdivisions and is experiencing a fair bit of the housing growth in this State. While that is the case, as of a few months ago, to my knowledge, my electorate has no actual class 2 building—so no apartments in all of my electorate despite the fact that it is growing rapidly. What that means is that at present the Building Commissioner has little power to act, despite the fact that there is a lot of construction going on in my part of the world. That, of course, will change should this bill pass through both Houses. I welcome that.

The electorate of Leppington and the Liverpool local government area [LGA], which is in my electorate, have seen some of the worst examples of poor building practice. I am aware of an example of a class 2 building in Lurnea, which falls in the electorate of Holsworthy. From memory, it is a six-storey building, and it has sat practically finished and empty for three or four years. I made inquiries as to what was going on. Effectively, what has happened is that the private certifier has been pulled out and council has been put on as the certifier because, despite being a five‑ or six‑storey building, it was constructed without any fire sprinklers. The building has a series of very serious defects which all relate to fire safety. But that was only discovered after the Building Commissioner received complaints, made an inspection of the site and acted. Pleasingly, with the passing of this bill, we will also be seeing that on class 1 buildings.

In my short time as the local member, I have had several complaints about class 1 buildings in Leppington, and I saw plenty when I doorknocked many of those new houses. A house in Denham Court stands out starkly in my memory. It could not have been no more than three or four years old. I knocked and the owner opened the door. Right down the hallway was a very distinct, very visible mould line. It was a double-storey building with obvious severe leaking happening. As I said, that building could not have been no more than three or four years old. Unfortunately, those stories are repeated across Leppington. Several constituents have come to my office complaining and I have seen some very poor examples.

One example is a house under construction at the moment, where they had to bury the water tank to save space. They decided that the best space to do that was under the driveway in the garage because if there were any issues with it, they could dig up the garage. The builder made a grave mistake and buried it halfway between the kitchen and the living room, so if there are any issues with the water tank they will have to rip up half the house. These are the kinds of issues that the Building Commissioner and the agency will be able to act on. It is a positive move. Certainly, the response in my electorate since the announcement on Sunday has been very welcome and very positive. I could go on all day with examples about poor building practice, but I will not bore the House. I am sure members are all aware of the issue and will be happy to see the bill passed.

The sweeping changes proposed in this bill will give the Building Commission unprecedented power over the entire sector. These changes will be critical, and we are determined to have the best building sector in the nation. Next year we will introduce a single reformed building Act to centralise the licensing regulation and enforcement of standards across the whole sector. These laws will ensure that homes in growing areas, like Leppington, meet the quality standard that buyers expect. I commend the Minister for his work on the bill. I wrote to him early in the piece as the member for Leppington, about a couple of issues concerning some of the shortcomings that currently exist. Home owners and such currently do have recourse to take things to NCAT, but I have written to him with a couple of examples where that has not proven to be effective. Obviously, the bill will go some way to fixing those issues. The new law will ensure that, in growing areas like mine, it will be harder for dishonest builders to cheat home buyers. It goes a long way to rebuilding trust and integrity in the construction industry and will ensure that home buyers are better off. That is what the Government is aiming to achieve. I commend the bill to the House.