Corpus Description

Few, if any, of the interviewees spoke particularly positively about their wider industry’s willingness to change in general terms, let alone to adopt sustainability in a serious way.

There seemed to be a strongly held belief that the housing and development industries were renowned for reluctance to change. As one interviewee stated:

“…because you’re working in an industry that’s largely come from a cottage style industry where each builder was their own boss… I think the industry in some ways has moved very fast and in other ways I think the cultural attitude of thinking sustainably is probably a little bit backwards.”

One interviewee used stormwater quality as an example of how the industry were unlikely to improve performance without a legislative push:

“…there's best practice targets [for stormwater quality] out there now for everyone, I think everyone is trying to achieve those, but it took the industry to set those, and those to be a target set by government to make all that actually happen. If those targets weren’t out there and weren't set it wouldn't be happening. So as an industry I think we're quite lazy.”

One reason speculated for this general resistance to change was a fear that it may adversely impact on profits:

“A lot of the builders, and I won’t say this applies to [us] necessarily, but a lot of the big builders and a lot of the medium and smaller ones, would be concerned about staying in business, which locks them into…ritualistic behaviour that they would be very threatened if you came up to them and said ‘there’s some things here that you need to change’. Change for them equals a threat to their profitability or their profit stream comes from doing certain things in certain ways. You ask them to change those things and, they’re going to drop an orange here. ‘I’ve got fifteen of them up in the air and you want me to add another thing as well?’”

Another reason that emerged from some of the interviews was a perception that the industry is largely “uneducated” and that this is a barrier to sustainability more broadly. As one interviewee described it:

“The problem with the housing industry, people are not educated. This is a very, very much a field cast to the stone age, as a result of many factors… when you come out of a trade school they teach you how to hammer nails and that’s not being derogatory, but it’s just a mere matter of associations. The people you associate [with] there are interested in learning a trade, they’re not interested in sustainability. If you went to, for example, a university, you’ll probably socialise with people from all your different groups, who have different views, they’re from environmental perspective or chemists so you start to get a different feel.”

One person, who interestingly enough had not themself completed tertiary studies, noted:

“…not wishing to sound judgmental but the preponderance of people with practical skills means you’re really good with practical skills. A lot of what we’re talking about now requires some, some intellectual rigour. You have to say, this is my constant irritation really, but half a page with four bullet points on it is sometimes not enough to be able to explore the implications and some of the ideas that we need to play with.”

They went on to add:

“…sustainability and environment is, has the potential to be the next big thing. But they’re not going to be able to deal with it in a really, really positive way unless they start to get their heads in there. They’ve got to learn some of this stuff.

There’s a whole new language. They know what these things are intuitively. They know what it means if you talk about their children running out of water, or their grandchildren running out of water. But having the competencies, the

organisational competencies to build a business that is dynamic and responsive and innovative, they are higher order things.”

Another interviewee noted that another barrier to ongoing education of the industry was that builders and tradespersons were not subject to professional standards in the way that

other disciplines, such as engineering, are with requirements for continuing professional development and the like:

”…the problem is that the industry is…not forced to uphold professional standards.

If you’re an engineer and you want to uphold your membership you’ve got to do so much training, I mean if you turn up to a breakfast these days you get your points ticked as a builder. So no-one’s forced to understand…”.

The view was expressed by some that this resistance usually ended up hurting the laggards. As one said:

“Most of the building industry fights tooth and nail until they get told it’s gotta happen and the day they get told it’s gotta happen, it’s gotta happen, and they’ve done no preparatory work whatsoever. And then they start doing it and it costs them three times, four times, what it’s costing us. Because they haven’t done their homework.”

However, this reluctance to change was generally also seen as a source of potential opportunity for the more proactive companies, by providing a source of competitive advantage, which they were cautious about sharing.

Interviewees were asked about the effects of industry fragmentation on sustainability, and mixed feelings were expressed about the degree to which it impacted on sustainable building innovations. Some saw it as a key barrier, while others felt that it could be, but did not need to be, depending very much on the people involved in implementing an initiative.

Several interviewees challenged the suggestion that the volume housing sector was fragmented, at least in Melbourne. As one stated:

“…it might seem fragmented but in fact it’s so common, you build a house like you build a house. And there might be some innovative builders doing some different shape windows or they can make it look whiz bang but ultimately it’s a slab, a frame, and bricks and tiles. And all the other things that go into it. And we’re all doing the same thing, some of us are doing it a bit better than the others.”

Another interviewee claimed:

“We all lobby government together through the UDIA and HIA, and generally you'll have a representative of every company on committees and boards and things along those lines, so I, no, I think we can go forward as an industry, and as a development industry…I don't see it as fragmented.”

While volume builders tried to maintain dedicated subcontractors, the interchangeable methods of construction and potential for movement by subcontractors between builders was acknowledged. As one person put it:

“Seeing every house is just a house, all we’re talking about is a modification to the skin. That’s what makes your house different from mine. We’re not talking about the essential constituents of that house, or the process of building it. They all swap staff, they all swap supervisors and managers, and they can swap them so easily because everybody knows what a house frame looks like. Everybody knows what F7 is. So there’s a common language here and if we build on those commonalities and say look, we all know what the problems are…”.

It was noted by some that industry fragmentation was much more of an issue for smaller builders. Because they were less likely have the knowledge, time or resources, including access to specialist advice, to learn about new legislative requirements and tools, it was suggested that they would tend to focus on bare minimum compliance requirements (unless they had a particular market niche, such as sustainable homes). As one interviewee commented:

“…it’s not just a matter of knowing how to rate a building – the truth is after you know how to rate a building you’ve then got to know how to achieve the same end but in a more economical and efficient manner. And that’s hard when you’re a small operator...”

Further, the reduced purchasing power of smaller builders was also noted to be a barrier to greater adoption of sustainable products and processes by these builders. However, counteracting this was their ability to viably absorb lower profit margins. As one

interviewee described it:

“...from a purchase point of view can we purchase some of these things at a lower price so we can bring it to the volume building market. Because we do compete to