Georgiou, Jim (2016) Legislative control and the quality of housing in Victoria. PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Abstract
The quest to improve the quality of new house construction has been ongoing worldwide. To achieve an improvement in quality, varying approaches have been adopted. For example, the United Kingdom has relied on industry sponsored standards through the National House Building Council (NHBC). In Australia, the State of Victoria trialed and discarded industry sponsored voluntary schemes and adopted Builder Registration as the preferred method of improving new house quality. The House Contracts Guarantee Act (HCGA) 1987 was an important step in that quest. This was deemed inadequate and was replaced by the Domestic Contracts Act 1995 (DBCTA). This was widely seen as a progression towards improving the quality of house construction. It follows that if the DBCA is purportedly an improvement on the HCGA 1987, then the research question becomes: "Can government legislation alone improve the quality of house construction?" This thesis builds on previous work (Georgiou et al. 1999) and reports on the results of a study of 631 houses constructed under the auspices of the DBCA 1995 and compares them to 770 houses constructed under the auspices of the HCGA 1987.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Raisbeck, Peter |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | housing; legislation; defects; quality; builder registration |
| Index terms: | builder, Victoria, legislation, house construction, United Kingdom, guarantee, housing, Australia |
| Subjects: | practitioner, construction type, contract structure, Geography, regions and continents, legal systems |
| Topics: | Roles and Professions, Legal Issues, Geographical Context, Construction Technology, Procurement |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
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