Time for council to understand pivot or perish
By Leigh McCready
The Sunshine Coast has a housing shortage, and so does Noosa, where lack of housing availability has been intensified by the Covid pandemic. People in Victoria and NSW have brought forward retirement plans to move here and, as remote working grows in acceptability, middle-aged professionals seek the better quality lifestyle of regional living.
These people have bid up the price of properties and rents, creating a boom for owners and a collapse in the availability of affordable housing and rentals for everyone else. Even reliable long-term tenants have been shown the door by investor-owners selling into a hot market, seeking higher rents or moving in themselves. Many long-standing friends and neighbours have departed, no longer able to afford the cost of living in the shire.
But there is an aspect of this situation that need not exist. Whenever a Covid-induced lockdown is mandated by the state government it is accompanied by a requirement for people to stay at home if they are not essential workers. In Noosa, almost unobserved amongst the radical shifts in the property market, this has impacted adversely the service delivery of some council departments.
In the private sector, flexible and responsive customer or client service is a necessity if businesses are to survive adverse conditions. The bureaucracy, seemingly unaffected by concerns such as loss of pay or job security, unhurriedly grinds its way through mountains of red tape.
The most recent Queensland lockdown (at the time of writing) began on Saturday 31 July. At the Parkridge Noosa residential development, Altum Constructions – a company I’m associated with – was ready for prospective owners to finally settle their purchases in this rehabilitated former sand mine and illegal dump, now a beautiful housing precinct.
Final settlement is a big moment for vendors and prospective owners alike. It is the point at which people who have purchased a unit or apartment off the plan can conclude the process and take possession of their new homes. In the current, final stage of Parkridge Noosa, 55 apartments are planned to settle, with the timing of settlements dependent upon certification and planning approvals from council.
Prior to settlement, though owners’ units are ready to occupy, they cannot move in and a limbo-like state is created as owners rent nearby while they wait to move into their new homes. Every unoccupied residence is another subtraction from the scarce Noosa housing stock.
There is no doubt that these delays could be avoided. Council’s planning and development department has deemed that, during lockdowns, certification staff are ‘non-essential’, so must work from home. Building work, however, is deemed essential, and at the final stage of delivering a new home, relies on council staff visually checking and approving the works. If projects are not completed within the contracted time, expensive liquidated damages may be triggered which have been known to send builders broke.
During the recent week of lockdown in Noosa, no council staff member was able to attend the construction site to certify those apartments which were ready for inspection. Nor were these public servants reachable by phone. Their personal numbers were not made available, presumably for privacy reasons, and no official phones had been issued to fill the gap. Offers by the builder to conduct the inspections via video-conference or via photographic evidence were not taken up.
At Parkridge Noosa, final certifications ground to a halt as council policy regarding the lockdown unnecessarily brought the process to a complete standstill.
Efforts to contingency plan for a possible extension of the lockdown were met with indecision by planning and certification staff, who explained they were not receiving managerial direction on how to solve the problem. Meanwhile, buildings sat empty, awaiting distressed owners trapped in unwanted rentals desperately wanted by other people.
Covid has meant a huge amount of change and upheaval. Across Australia, the always vulnerable micro, family, small and medium businesses have had to innovate and transform work routines and practices to stay afloat. It’s been a matter of pivot or perish. It is surely not too much to ask that governments make some small effort to understand the impacts of lockdowns and make adjustments to better support the continuation of business.
While businesses across Queensland go belly-up waiting for government to act, it is frustrating to imagine bureaucrats tucked up safely at home on full pay and with secure jobs and not even a phone call from a client to bother them. Covid looks like being with us for a long time, likely housing shortages too. It’s time governments got their act together.
(Leigh McCready is a local businesswoman, most recently general manager of Altum Constructions’ Great Keppel Island resort re-building project. She has leadership roles in a number of community associations in Noosa Shire.)
