The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) hosted the first of a series of Building Stronger Homes Roundtables last week, exploring the role of construction standards in national natural disaster resilience.

ICA and the Master Builders Association are inviting senior leaders to participate and help kickstart development of national property resilience policies.

The meeting called on the Government to make its building code compliance and enforcement system fit for purpose, including the establishment of a central body.

“This must include establishing a better process for providing tools to facilitate compliance, audit, surveillance, information sharing, training and interpretation of standards and codes,” Master Builders CEO Denita Wawn said.

The roundtable called on the Government to also include natural hazard resilience as an objective of the National Construction Code, and enable better access to regulated Australian Standards in the National Construction Code.

Appearing at the first roundtable were senior representatives of the Australian Building Codes Board, the National Bushfire Recovery Agency, IAG, Suncorp, the James Cook University Cyclone Testing Centre.

The meeting identified initiatives the insurance and building sectors can pursue, including sharing reliable data, development of best practice standards for builders, helping homeowners mitigate insurance risk and continuing to identify and pursue joint pilot initiatives.

The next roundtable will be held in February.