Mongrel industry robs even the dignity of the dispossessed

The real impact of construction sector rogues revealed in anguished cries

The Queensland Government is now driving changes to better protect the powerless in one of the state's biggest industries. Picture: zorandimzr

By Bill Hoffman

THE anguish was heartbreaking.

Crying, her control gone, the woman's attempts to speak were defeated by grief and desperation.

Wracked by continual sobs she couldn't contain, her search for breath and dignity and words to describe her situation was achieved without them.

Her pain, helplessness and fear for now, and the future, was present in every choked word that stammered down the phone.

There are literally no words of comfort or hope you can offer in the face of such vulnerability.

This was a woman, who had worked hard all her life, who loved and who had supported her husband through thick and thin as they have battled to create and hang onto a life other than the one they now shared.

"No-one will help us," she cried. "What can we do now?"

Now is a shed the couple owns outside a central Queensland town.

It had been both a retreat from the previous loss of a home due to circumstance similar to the situation she was now attempting to describe, and an opportunity for new beginnings.

It had become a basic but welcoming home for visitors, and a sanctuary.

Now it was just another vestige of lost hope on a downward slide caused not by their unwillingness to "have a go" as some have put it.

The fear was palpable, identifiable in every tortured sob that heaved from deep inside her.

After five years of listening to others like her, similarly caught and equally desperate small business people stripped of dignity, hope and terrified for the future there was absolutely nothing I could offer, no words of comfort that would not ring hollow.

Instead I listened in silence as she fought to contain emotions, long bottled but now flowing through my earpiece.

Eventually she found the control she was seeking.

She fought back from the loss of it as if girding herself, accepting the awful realities that lay ahead, and tried to speak.

"No-one will help us," the woman said.

"No-one.

"Our contract terms were 60 days, but after the first payment it would take 120 days.

"How can we, how could we fight them?

"We are left begging for money all the time. We beg for our money.

"We wait and wait and don't, can't pull out.

"We just live in hope. We live in a shed. We're just trying to sell everything now."

The woman and her husband and their small subcontract business have been left on the edge of bankruptcy by the latest of 37 major construction sector insolvencies that have occurred in Queensland since 2013 alone.

When she called she had been in the process of sorting through every possession they owned for anything that could be sold.

Years of hard work and similar setbacks had cost them much but not their spirit.

But the wolves now are at the door.

There are no more lines of credit to sustain them.

Hope, as fragile and futile as it was, had left the building.

Owed $100,000 she now realises they will never see and overdue with payments to the suppliers whose terms had long been exceeded, she can see no way forward.

The couple have arrived where they now are through no real fault of their own beyond the desire to carve a place for themselves through hard work and skill.

Their mistake has only been to trust the untrustworthy, the constant demand of those at the weak end of the power imbalance that is the modern Australian construction industry.

The deal that industry demands of those whose labour and credit lines sustain nearly every construction project - private or government - is simply unjust but the only game in town.

Sixty-day payment terms leave mum and dad businesses terribly exposed. Their circumstance becomes on the borders of catastrophic by every late payment.

Unable to demand money they are owed and lacking the capacity to legally fight for it they are forced to beg for any payment, anything to keep going.

Little matter the money they, themselves, owe has paid for the materials and labour used to build whatever project to which they have been contracted.

The Queensland Government is now driving changes to better protect the powerless in one of the state's biggest industries.

It needs to do more than that. As the industry regulator it has an obligation to those a long-entrenched system continues in the meantime to let down.

And as one of its biggest clients and therefore beneficiaries of the unrecompensed effort of thousands of small businesses like the one collapsing around my caller's ears it needs to step up and make good their loss.

Anything less would ring as hollow as any platitude I could muster.