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Western Australia’s new building commissioner has made his living listening to people complain.
“People don’t write to me and say, ‘My builder is great’,” Phillip Payne says. “That just doesn’t happen.”
It’s a role the lifelong public servant is well-equipped for, having starting his career in Perth’s courthouses fresh out of high school.
The experience made Payne an expert on regulations, rules and standards, and an annoying thorn in the side for government departments.
“Back in those days, they used to give information to people, and they’d come to the courts – then [I’d hear it] and say, ‘Well that’s not quite right’,” he says.
“So I’d ring up … and [the department] would say, ‘If you know it so well why don’t you come over and do it?’”
And Payne did, beginning a 35-year career spanning the development of the very commission he is now leading.
Speaking from the brown-brick office in Cannington that houses a number of Western Australia’s regulatory bodies, Payne is settling in to the new role he was appointed to the role earlier this year.
“But by and large, they’ve just gotten on with it and responded,” he says.
“We haven’t had really any influx of complaints come in, and that tells me that the builders are well-placed to manage expectations and deal with things. Now, whether or not that has a flow-on effect down the track because of prices rise, we won’t know [for some time]. We just haven’t seen complaints come in yet.”
And when they do come in, Payne says, it’s almost always when a house is finished.
“Things like, ‘That’s not the colour I asked for’, or, ‘That painting is patchy’, or ‘The brick paving is different’,” he says.
“We only see the issues where people are having problems, and they may be problems that are actually really serious … sometimes the builder’s got it wrong, and we support both parties to get those resolved.
“Yeah, that happens. But if you look at the total percentage of [complaints to] construction, it’s pretty small.”
Payne says out of 26,000 homes built last year – that’s new builds, not renovations or extensions – only a handful of complaints ended up being anything the regulator needed to step in on.
However, he does acknowledge the high level of publicity offered to those who were doing the wrong thing has lent itself to West Australians possessing a warped understanding of its own building industry.
“No one wants to intentionally set out to do a bad job, so occasionally while we do have some bad performers, so does everyone else,” he says.
Payne says it’s a muscle he’s glad he will be able to flex if needed.
“[If the bill passes], new powers could in will give me the ability to require information,” he says.
“I’ll be able to make recommendations to the Building Services Board to suspend operations.
“Now, that won’t necessarily help people who already have contracts, but it’ll stop them getting in more, and that’s what we saw in Nicheliving – where they continue to sign people up, and more and more people got involved.
“Whereas we’ll have the ability to cut builders off if they’re doing the wrong thing.”
But, Payne wants to stress, that is not the norm.
The building industry in WA is subject to that many regulations, standards and rules, and he says Nicheliving was an outlier that was not reflective of the broader sector.
And it’s a sector that continues to evolve.
“They don’t build them like they used to,” Payne says jokingly.
“In fact, there’s a whole there’s a whole range of different issues we have now that challenges builders – cost standards, design structures, and all those sorts of things.
“It’s not for me to say whether that’s good or bad, but the industry is very different [from 30 years ago] and it continues to evolve.
“I think consumers can have confidence in the sector, and I think they deserve to have confidence in the sector.”
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