An update on our submission to the Victorian government 

Submissions to the inquiry into non-payment of construction workers has now closed. 

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking to workers and business owners who have been affected by this issue.  We heard from subcontractors, builders, plumbers and more who haven’t been paid for works or materials, sending a powerful message to the government about just how common this is. Shockingly, some of the amounts individuals were owed added up to over $1 million, with many hundreds of thousands.  We collated your experiences to form our submission to the Victorian government that calls for real solutions. 

Together as a group of organisations who deal with non-payment of subcontractors we advocated for reform of the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act 2002 (VIC).

In our submission we called for:

1. Implementation of statutory trust accounts to protect subcontractors against insolvency;
2. Simplified reference dates – so that they arise expressly once a month and post-termination;
3. Changes to definitions, including a change to the definition of work so that retention money can be recovered;
4. Changes to ensure disputed variations are easier to recover;
5. Changes to the definition of ‘Excluded Amounts’”