On Monday, Master Builders Victoria lodged a submission to the Small Business Regulation Review (Regulatory Interaction – Construction Sector) run by the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. The key focus of the review is the day-to-day interactions that small businesses have with regulators.

Matters raised with the review included improving consultation with stakeholder groups, the need for better centralised planning, and the reduction of technical expertise among regulators which results in small businesses having fewer opportunities to seek technical or advisory information from regulators.

As part of the submission, Master Builders noted that our members’ experiences include inconsistencies and overlaps among regulators themselves. We know that our members experience confusion with regulator red tape when dealing with multiple government entities, and encouraged the government to look into this issue further.

We also looked at the practices of a number of regulators themselves including the VBA, local councils, WorkSafe, the Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria (DBDRV) and VCAT. We raised issues such as on-the-spot fines from inspectors and increasing police- check processes for company registration as examples of regulator behaviours that need simplifying.

The Sector Group Committees provided comment on the draft submission and the policy team acknowledges their contribution to our work. The full submission can be found here.