Building warranty hopes hinge on state election

LAUNCESTON home owners Janine Bransden and Chris Carlson hope this weekend's Tasmanian election will provide a fix for the troubled home warranty insurance scheme left after the collapse of insurer HIH.

Seven years after it was built, their dream home is riddled with defects and they have now been left with a $185,000 legal bill.

Unable to claim against compulsory builders' warranty insurance - which typically costs around $2500 - and struggling to make mortgage repayments, the couple are saddled with an unsaleable property that Roy Ormerod, Tasmania 's Director of Consumer Affairs, said was so bad even blind Freddie could see the defects.

The Tasmanian Greens have pledged to replace the home warranty scheme with an industry-operated model proposed by the Builders Collective of Australia.

Retiring Attorney-General Judy Jackson has also indicated that her successor may review the couple's case.

Big insurance companies, who must only pay out if a builder dies, disappears or becomes insolvent, collect about $350 million in annual premiums under the last-resort home warranty insurance scheme cobbled together by state ALP governments after HIH's 2001 collapse.

The Greens claim the scheme offers little, if any, protection to consumers and has destroyed the livelihoods of many small builders denied coverage by insurance companies.

Greens state MP and small business spokesman Kim Booth said the alternative scheme proposed by the Builders Collective would allow for rapid dispute resolution, with an independent adjudicator, and give equal rights to consumers and builders.

He said it would be industry-funded and have a claims pool that remained in Australia .

Mr Booth said the Bransden-Carlson case had shone a spotlight on a nationwide system that was broken. Although the couple obtained their insurance under an old HIH scheme, they could not make a claim despite some 40 faults being found by the insurer, including a badly leaking roof.

As with the current scheme, the policy required that the dispute with the builder be resolved at an industry arbitration.

Ultimately they lost the arbitration in a decision which Mr Ormerod said he had great difficulty comprehending.

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