Legal – the VCAT is not a solution

SPHERES OF POWER & INFLUENCE

For next week’s Building List at VCAT, the week ending 29/7/2022, there were 114 separate cases. This is the breakdown of those case numbers by year, origination, or filing:

If you were a consumer or punter, 2021 was a bad year, yet if you were a lawyer or consultant in the building field, it was a good year. The legal fees and revenue gathered in this single week are unknown; these numbers are just one week out of forty-six; the totals are anyone’s guess.

Being a building consumer involved in a VCAT dispute can be exceedingly tricky and challenging. Firsthand accounts tell us of the personal and financial costs, causing some families never to recover. They come damaged to VCAT, hurt by a rogue industry overseen by a much-investigated regulator, and in most cases, leaving dissatisfied and with more financial difficulties than when they came. There are many questions to be answered.

Can you have too many directions hearings? Do the concepts of natural justice and procedural fairness take years to deliver? Do those same tenets apply to all parties equally? Please give us your feedback about your experience.

Like most challenging issues, these numbers are a small slice in time, with no one willing to accept nor discuss the underlying problem that faces the building consumer.

Fiona O’Hehir & the Team

We share experiences to help others, hoping to avoid some of the pitfalls. We are not lawyers, and we do not give advice.

NSURANCE