I too rise to speak on the Domestic Building Contracts Amendment Bill 2025. As we have heard in this place, the aim of this bill is to further strengthen protections for folks in domestic building contracts as they go about building their dream home. I have to say, representing a growth corridor here in Victoria that is one of the fastest growing areas not just here in Victoria but also in Australia, we really need stronger protections for those people who are trying to build their dream home. This has been a long time coming. What we do know is that Victoria is leading the nation when it comes to building more homes, and that is because we know that building more homes means more opportunity, especially for our younger Victorians, as they look and try to secure a place to live, to raise a family and to work in their local community.

Just this weekend the Minister for Planning announced that we would be speeding up planning approvals for small homes. This new single-home code will streamline approvals for single homes and small second dwellings on lots under 300 square metres.

I do have to say at 300 square metres they are small homes. It is one of the many reforms that we have introduced in this space in order to get more homes built as we try to reach that target of 800,000 new homes over a period of 10 years.

This stuff is really important, and that is because without planning reform we likely will not meet these targets. Of course without fairer laws around domestic building contracts, people who are going ahead and building their dream home are at risk of falling into a nightmare, and we have heard lots of those stories over the past couple of years. I have had countless amounts of people that have contacted my office when we saw this play out a couple of years ago with the collapse of Porter Davis Homes, which we all thought was a solid, reputable building company. You do not find out things are going badly until they fall flat and people are left with nowhere to turn, with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested and with a half-built home that they cannot move into.

Even today, more than two years after that happened, I remember speaking to folks in the community, including those people who were in the process of building their new home. In fact I was living across the road from a property that was half built – it had a beautiful pool, a concrete pool – that we used to walk past and think, ‘Gosh, that’d be a nice house.’ It sat absolutely vacant, unable to be completed, for such a long period of time. I no longer live in that street and I am not sure what happened to it, but that family must have been absolutely devastated. These were people who were in the process of building new homes and were suddenly left uninsured and at risk of losing their deposit. Anyone here in this place who has gone ahead and tried to build a home knows that those deposits are not a small amount of money.

I remember how proud I was to see our government step in and go ahead and provide assistance to so many of these families. But what we knew then was that there needed to be significant reform in the sector if we did not want this to happen again – and we cannot let this happen again. That is why our government legislated to require that a builder take out domestic building insurance for a home construction before receiving any deposit or payment whatsoever. We made the decision to commence a review of the Domestic Building Contracts Act 1995 because we knew that there was more that we should and needed to do to protect home builders. What this bill does is it makes good on the outcomes of that review, which tells us that, yes, we still need to strengthen protections for consumers whilst also ensuring that the construction industry – the industry we need; let us face it, we need this industry to survive, because we need them to build our homes, our apartments and units – is well supported now and into the long term.

These reforms are about fairness, and they are all about lifting standards that are outdated and, I would have to say, in some places archaic. They are about making sure that when Victorians enter into a contract to build a new home they do so with confidence in the industry and that if anything should go wrong, they will be okay. When you are building a home, it is not built overnight. It can take years to have your dream home built, and those home builders need to ensure that they have protections. That is what this bill is all about.

The first important step that this bill takes relates to payment timing requirements. Believe it or not, the provisions relating to this section about how and when builders receive payment under a major domestic building contract have not been updated. I could not believe this when I read it. They have not been updated and they have not been amended in over 30 years. It is clear to anyone that they have fallen out of step with the expectations of a modern building industry, with the expectations of my local community, who have been going gangbusters and building homes like there is no tomorrow. What we needed to do was set up a new up-to-date framework for regulating payments, and we needed to implement that framework as quickly as possible. This bill will help achieve this by creating a new regulatory head of power which will be able to regulate different aspects of payment – everything from prescribing deposit limits to progress payment stages across all different types of building contracts. What we have done is ensured that by enshrining this in a regulatory framework, our government has greater flexibility to go ahead and update requirements in different circumstances, which allows these regulations to be updated and amended a whole lot more easily over time.

Really importantly, it is also going to provide greater clarity for builders and consumers on what they are allowed to prescribe or pay at any given stage for any given project. For example, a builder will not be able to demand or receive more than a limit prescribed in the regulations. Hypothetically, this may be something like not being able to demand more than 10 per cent of the build for the first stage of the project; that is a clear example. It would also mean that a builder will not be able to demand or receive payment that is worth more than the percentage of work they have completed on a home or renovation, and I think that is really important. There needs to be an incentive for builders to go on and finish the job. Like I said before, some jobs are finished really quickly, and other jobs that I have seen in my community have had really ridiculously long construction periods. So what will this mean? For example, a builder will not be able to claim more than 75 per cent of the cost of the overall build if they have only constructed a third of the house. This is really important for consumers because it creates a general expectation of proportionality when it comes to payment. It also helps protect their money.

Another really important change that the bill makes is to enable cost escalation clauses with stronger consumer protections. We know from recent years that inflation can affect the cost of building something – we absolutely know that. The same is also true for building new homes – everything from building materials, labour costs and uncertainty around the supply of certain materials. We have learned how precarious our global market can be. We saw and heard about a lot of hold-up in the construction industry, particularly in those first few months and years post COVID. All of these things can mean that the cost of building a new home can be somewhat greater than the price that was originally agreed upon, and we know what this has meant for a lot of building works. Builders sometimes cannot afford to deliver new builds without having the consumer pay extra, and that becomes really tricky, like I said, when you are trying to introduce new laws and regulations that are based on fairness for both parties. We understand that this is a major challenge for the construction industry, who have asked us for a fairer cost escalation system to reflect the changing costs of materials and labour. But this still needs to be fair, importantly, to the consumer as well, and that is why this bill will allow for cost escalation clauses. But what it will do is provide a limit; it will limit these to major domestic building contracts that are worth more than $1 million or cap the increase in the contract by no more than 5 per cent of the cost. This is just one way we are trying to make it fair but also balanced and make sure we have got that healthy construction industry, because like I said, we really need that industry to be thriving, because we need them to build our homes, particularly to get to that target of being able to build 800,000 more homes here in Victoria.

The bill contains a number of different amendments, and some of them are really fantastic. I think the message to my local community, as they continue to go on and they build their first home and their second home and homes for their kids, is that we are all about fairness. We want to make sure there are greater protections for consumers but also recognise the importance of having fairness and protections for the building industry. This is a fantastic bill, and I commend it to the house.