What do Easter Show bags and Construction deaths have in common?
My article published in the FifthEstate this week reports on a construction safety culture that prevails in a section of the industry who don't give a damn and think they can get away with it. It is also the tip of the iceberg in Australia's and its sovereign state's failed industry governance capabilities. This is not just a construction safety issue, it applies equally to construction work and materials compliance, compliance with licensing, the regulation of construction waste, the recording of embedded carbon and of course regulation of the industry's companies and those who run them in what is regarded to be the most high risk nationally.
Readers should note that this blog is just another winge. I am very positive about the construction industry's future. The industry must however shake off its traditional image and present as a new 'sunrise' asset class.
Australia's construction industry lacks a purposeful view of its future self. It is held back by institutions and interests that are focused on the immediate whats in it for me syndrome. The nations regulators lurch from one defence of their processes to another. They are simply playing out the last vestiges of a traditionally framed regulatory system and tools of the last century. They are at sea in a digital, industrialising and global construction market-place. Some have the short-term view that the industry's construction assurance risks are simply a border control issue. I will be speaking this week at a Australia China Council conference dealing with 'Developing a competitive Advantage in the Chinese Design and Construction market - collaboration and exploration. My talk is themed - 'When you live in a glass house, you should not throw stones'.
All of this commentary once seemed to be more about 'one hand clapping', but there is a growing and observable appreciation of the unavoidable need for change and that change is coming like it or not. The FifthEstate article below chronicles a broken NSW safety regulatory system but it could have been in any other important industry regulatory framework. All crafted in the last industrial century and 'un-future-fit'.
Safety is a threshold risk in construction. It is argued that reportable incidents and deaths are well down. Some argue that the records are fiddled. While the trend is down, how much better could they be and how many more deaths can be avoided? My agitation has received a well intended invitation from SafeWork NSW to 'come inside the tent and share this challenge'. But, I do not want to become a part of the same old 'same' digging the same hole deeper. I want to be part of a movement that looks across all of the industry's regulatory bodies with a view to starting a unified fresh hole. One that considers how a future-fit regulatory system can act as a service to industry not a burden. One where the cost of compliance processes and duplications cost the industry billions each year for less and less effect. Where the only counter to this is more accommodation of sliding industry capability and regular slashing of the rules (aka red-tape).
This week I had a lengthy call from a consultant in the Construction compliance space. He pointed to the here and now challenges of declining industry capabilities, falling apprenticeship completions, construction professionals with more theoretical skill than applied experience and regulatory agencies who feel the skills and resources needed in the enforcement of our regulatory space could be shared with 'show bags' et al. Here governments cannot escape their responsibility to be leaders in uplifting public confidence in the built world. To do this requires deep industry knowledge and confidence to pursue the alternate when business as usual has failed. Recalibration of the construction industry's regulatory compliance trajectory depends on it.
My caller who is a highly passionate regulatory practitioner asked 'well if the journey to a future fit regulatory framework in a modern digitised and globalised construction eco-system will take 5 to 7-years, what do we do in the interim?' My response was that the remnants of the existing regulatory organisations who may want to help prepare the industry for a smarter, better, safer and more competitive future should use the intervening period to enact the most ruthless and potent crack-down on the breachers. This action should be explained by the fact that not all will be coming on the journey, and that those who imagine they may, should be fast tracking their capabilities and culture to work in a modern construction world. And more importantly, the remnant regulators will need to imagine how they will operate in a multi- jurisdictional global construction eco-system where local sovereign functionality will need to adapt.
The FifthEstate article was headed 'Its time for the minister to step up over construction safety'. This is a good segway to finish. It is time for modern governments to recognise they serve the public interest first. There is no reason for that priority to be in conflict with fostering a vibrant and profitable construction industry. However, governments who submit to loosing public confidence in their institutions will pay the price. Making the future built-world has never been more dependent on visible, effective leadership. This requires for example, Ministers to be as visible in the face of the construction safety accidents and death as they are with show bags. The construction safety crack down we are all supposed to be witnessing is nothing more than a whimper. It reminds me of how the novel 'Lord of the Flies' ends.
And perhaps the industry might see the current stream of WorkSafe blogs move from nice little messages, to real time exhibits of the guilty being dealt their due justice. The ambiguous blog below is more akin to 'would the last person to leave the room please turn out the light', rather tham any unavoidable call to action. But that is just my view.
