When Geoff bought his home in Hobart more than a decade ago he was preparing for life after retirement with his wife Claire.

The couple had put most of their savings into building the house but when they eventually moved in, they quickly realised there were some issues.

“In even moderate wind conditions, we had to put a prop up across the kitchen to hold the front wall from moving,” Geoff told the ABC.

It triggered a long legal fight with his builder, which was eventually settled. But it took a toll.

“It crept and groaned to the extent that a couple of visitors refused to sit in the sitting area because they were afraid that the door, the wall would fall in,” he said.

The issues surrounding building quality in Australia have been highlighted in a new report from the Australian Housing and Urban Institute (AHURI). 

It found about 70 per cent of existing homes have building quality problems, while more than two-thirds of homes have an energy rating of three stars or lower.

University of South Australia’s Lyrian Daniel, who was the lead author of the report, said Australia was lagging behind other developed countries when it came to adopting building regulations.

“Australia really just doesn’t have the policy instruments or policies in place that one might expect for building performance and housing quality and condition,” Dr Daniel said.

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Fear of windows breaking, walls falling in amid cancer diagnosis

With governments across state and federal levels signalling the ramping up efforts to build new homes to meet Australia’s housing demand, Dr Daniel said it was time to act.

“So all of these homes were almost effectively reducing their useful life, because it’s almost as soon as they’re built, they’re not up to what we might consider a standard that’s fit for purpose,” she said.

“In the future, we can imagine that people living in those homes are going to be much more exposed to fluctuations in energy prices because they’re over-reliant on heating and cooling.

“Looking ahead to changing weather patterns with climate change, they’re less likely to be climate resilient.”

Geoff recalled life back when he was dealing with the issues with his home.

He would regularly check if the prop against the wall was stable but he had contingencies in place in case something did happen.

“We had sheets out on the floor in case the wall fell in and all the windows broke… so just being practical about it,” he said.

In the same period, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

“I just had to have it fixed so that my wife had an asset to live by,” he said.

“I couldn’t afford to repair the house, but we had a shack, which had been a family shack. So we simply had to sell that, which we did, and use that money to have the house repaired.”

What are some solutions?

University of New South Wales Professor Philip Oldfield is calling for Australia to adopt a national strategy to improve the country’s existing housing stock.

“Part of the challenge is there’s no kind of central database to understand how good or poor our homes are,” Professor Oldfield said.

He explained the only existing way to assess the quality of Australia’s housing stock was the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS).

The AHURI report found that about 70 per cent of existing homes have an energy rating of about three stars or lower.

“So any new house, pretty much in most states now has to be what’s called seven stars, and that is a rating system from zero stars to 10 stars,” he said.

He said without action to improve existing homes people would suffer.

“It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse … conditions of homes that get very hot or very cold can spark mortality and morbidity issues,” he said.

“We spend a huge amount of time in our homes, and they have an intrinsic impact on our quality of life. And so we need to ask ourselves as a nation, how do we improve that?”

What are some international examples?

Dr Daniel pointed to the example of the United Kingdom, and more broadly the European Union, where it has been mandatory for all dwellings either sold or rented to have an energy performance certificate since 2008.

“That rates homes on a sort of alphabetical scale from A being the best, and then progressively worse,” she said.

“They started to get this really large coverage across their housing stock, and been able to get a picture of the condition of the houses within that UK stock.

“And then they were also able to leverage that system to go, well, actually, we’re going to target the worst performing houses now and require that they be brought up to a particular standard.”

Dr Daniel said the difficulty in Australia with national housing policies was the power of the states.

“The National Construction Code is set, obviously, at a national level, and then it’s up to the states and territories to adopt and administer the code,” she said.

“What we’ve seen with the 2022 update is that the states and territories have adopted and transitioned to the 2022 code at different phases.

“[We need] some kind of incentive for the states to follow the national lead … [and] perhaps penalties for laggard states, that don’t adopt or transition to these national measures.”

The end of the housing issues but the loss of their retirement fund

Before even moving into the new home back in 2012, Geoff had planned to make the most of their retirement by travelling abroad.

But the ongoing issues over the years, and the eventual repairs, according to Geoff, ate into all their savings and meant the travel they had planned post-retirement was no longer going to be possible.

“We were planning perhaps to go to Canada and Alaska and have a look up there, but we couldn’t do that … So we’ve missed out on those retirement opportunities,” he said.

Despite that, Geoff said he has a sense of relief that the ordeal was over and his cancer was in a more manageable place. 

Two years on from the repairs being complete, Geoff said there have been no more cracks in the wall, or sleepless nights worrying if it might collapse.

“I noticed now that I don’t have those awful twinges in the morning,” he said.

“I didn’t realise how much it was affecting me until I didn’t have it.”