Queensland

Flood affected New Performing Arts Venue NPAC - Queensland

Wow!! What a crazy and insane 3 months since the December newsletter in the construction industry in Qld. Literally 2 days before the EBA Christmas shutdown saw the opening up of the borders to our southern friends and it saw the state experience its first real exposure to Covid-19. We had daily case numbers of 10,000 for quite a few weeks which impacted all of our job sites when we returned on 5th January 2022. Job sites were running at approx. 60% of the workforce, which obviously severely impacted construction programs.

The collapse of ProBuild obviously effected The CBUS Properties project at 433 Queen Street Brisbane, this is still a work in progress, with a focus to receiving payment for works completed and currently owed, whilst negotiating in good faith with the developer and the appointed builder, yet to be announced.

Less than a week after the ProBuild collapse saw the devastating Brisbane floods hit our city, 70% of our normal annual rainfall falling in 3 days, which affected all of our jobs across the board. The ongoing fallout of the flood damage has brought our NPAV job to a halt as it still goes through the clean-up process with the basement levels a complete write off with all newly installed services needing to be pulled out, amenities, crib rooms, offices, meeting rooms all destroyed and needing to be rebuilt before any construction can look like recommencing.

On a more positive note, we received news in the new year that we had been awarded 2 Satellite Hospitals in Tugun and Ripley, however this was soured by the floods and delayed both start dates until around April.

PICAC Beenleigh is close to closing out the project with the final commissioning taking place on the Gas Systems. This will then allow the college to begin to implement the training of students utilising Hydrogen. At the Inner-City State Secondary College, things are slowing down for us with some of the companies affected by the ProBuild collapse. Over at the Cross River Rail – Roma St project, we have Jeremy facilitating scope gap work and temp installs between the Roma Street and Albert Street stations and we are really putting in the hard yards in the office with both our estimating and design teams trying to secure the main hydraulic packages to these stations. The awarding of these packages has been a real slow burn, but we expect all of our hard work to pay off.

We have secured an early works package with John Holland Group out at Saint Andrews Private Hospital in Ipswich, which we hope will put us in a good position to pick up the main package involving a 5 level Cancer Centre.

Up North in Cairns at the Convention Centre, Luke has dropped down to 1 plumber as this job continues to struggle and fall behind program due to circumstances out of our control. We feel your pain Luke and Tommy, but as always in our industry when it comes will open up on all fronts.

Finally at the Queens Wharf Casino Project, when we just looked like getting ready to ramp up, the glazier on the project went into liquidation (via ProBuild), putting the brakes on the potential for an influx of labour. Chris and his crew are doing a great job with what areas they have available to them to plumb and we have been able to save blokes from redundancy with an acceleration of prefab work back at the yard.

The work behind the scenes when ProBuild collapsed, securing tools and materials from site was outstanding, the work in the office getting reports and reams and reams of unexpected paperwork for insurance, liquidators was above and beyond, the culture we have fostered among the work group, seeing many of our plumbers take annual leave to keep another plumber employed has been very rewarding and for that I thank you all.

Justin Pitts QLD Manager