Austin Bongart: Ballan footy stalwart pleads guilty over $33k concreting and fencing con
A country footy stalwart pocketed thousands from trusting customers of his failed concreting and fencing business. All they got in return were excuses.
A country football stalwart and tradie has been fined $18,000 and ordered to pay back tens-of-thousands to the victims of his shonky, now-defunct concreting and fencing business.
Austin Bongar, 28, of Ballan, Austin Bongart on Friday pleaded guilty to breaching the Australian Consumer Law and the Domestic Building Contracts Act over 18 months between mid-2022 and early 2024.
Bongart, a stalwart of the Ballan Football Club, ran Aussie’s Concrete and Fencing Solutions, and took more than $33,000 in deposits for jobs he either started, or only performed a small amount of work on, before vanishing.
Bongart’s deposits were between 30 and 80 per cent of the total cost of the job, in breach of a law that limits the amount of a deposit to 10 per cent on jobs worth less than $20,000
One of the jobs, worth $17,000, qualified as a major domestic building contract, but Bongart failed to provide the homeowner with an information statement, and was not a qualified building practitioner.
Bongart typically did no work at all, but in one case, he installed three fence posts before vanishing.
In another, he had a large amount of crushed rock delivered to a victim’s front yard, where it sat for months.
Consumer Affairs and police were inundated with complaints about Bongart, and his website was littered with one-star reviews describing him as a “fraud” and a “scammer”.
“I would give him less than one star if I could. He gets the deposit and vanishes,” one victim wrote.
Bongart repeatedly fobbed off his victims, telling one he could not do work on her fence because “I am lying in bed crook as a dog”.
He told another victim he was running late because he was “stuck on the highway” but never showed up to work.
He told another he could not work because of a football injury and the weather.
Bongart’s victims were in Harkness, Cardigan, Keilor East, Rockbank, Melton, Eynesbury and Weir Views.
Bongart’s lawyer, Carlin Grant, said: “The conduct for which Mr Bongart is pleading is very serious.
“Mr Bongart feels truly terrible for his conduct, which has left customers in this state of affairs.”
Magistrate Ross Maxted said Bongart’s victims were “unfortunately exposed to a person who was conducting a business beyond his capacity or competence, particularly his financial abilities”.
He said homeowners who hire tradespeople should feel certain the work they pay large amounts of money for will be done.
He said Bongart was fit, healthy, and physically capable from his years of playing country footy for Ballan, but that running a construction business “requires more than that”.
“It requires dedication in regard to business and acting in accordance with standards in regards to a business.”
“Those standards are not hard to discover, they are not complex.”
“(Bongart) had significant nous to register an ABN, what he failed to take into account were his moral obligations to people and his legal obligations to people.”
Bongart has since shut his business.
Mr Maxted said the penalties imposed on Bongart should send a message to other shonky tradies.
He convicted Bongart on all three charges, fined him a total of $18000, and imposed an 18-month adjourned undertaking with a condition he donate $500 to charity.
He also ordered more than $20,000 in debts still owing to be repaid.
