The Victorian Building Authority (VBA) had a problem that its own staff could see but couldn’t name. When Anna Cronin arrived as chief executive officer in July 2023, she found an organisation with a full legislative toolkit and very little meaningful enforcement activity.
Inspections were undifferentiated – a new suburb, house by house, builder by builder, with no reference to where risk actually sat. The discipline process was so elongated that a builder could be found to have caused consumer harm and face a fine eighteen months later. And if a consumer came through the door with a serious defect complaint, the organisation’s default was to move the problem on rather than solve it.
“There was a sort of cultural silt in the operations about the regulator being there to look after practitioner livelihoods rather than consumer outcomes,” Cronin told TMR in a recent conversation.
That phrase – cultural silt – warrants dwelling on. It implies not active corruption, not deliberate capture, but a slow accumulation of the wrong habits. A disposition. And dispositions are harder to change than structures, because they can survive restructures entirely intact.
The tension regulators don’t name
What Cronin did first was name the tension explicitly, in terms most regulators avoid. The consumer-outcomes frame she brought to the VBA is often described, including by Cronin herself, as a philosophical shift. In the same breath, she pulls it back.
“It’s not a tension between builders complying. If they comply, the consumer outcomes will be good. It’s forgiving them too easily or not being effective as a regulator – that’s the tension.”
“It’s not a tension between builders complying. If they comply, the consumer outcomes will be good. It’s forgiving them too easily or not being effective as a regulator – that’s the tension.”
–Anna Cronin
This is a more precise and more uncomfortable formulation than “consumer-first”. It places the problem not in the industry but in the regulator’s own willingness to act. The old VBA, Cronin said, would look at a decision to impose a substantial fine on a builder and conclude: if we fine them that amount, they may go out of business. The livelihood concern would win. The defect would not be fixed.
Rather than a hypothetical tension, it is the everyday arithmetic of a regulator that has become oriented toward managing the people it regulates rather than the harms its regulated activity produces. It shows up in enforcement thresholds, in staff guidance, in the length of disciplinary processes, and in the culture that accumulates around all of these.
What the pivot required
The first thing Cronin did – before restructuring, before new functions, before anything visible – was publish a Regulatory Policy Statement. It had two messages: consumers first; all tools used.
“You might have looked at that and said, well, why the hell weren’t you doing that before? And that’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that – because to me, they’re very obvious things.”
Before issuing anything publicly, she had spent time with affected consumers – sitting at kitchen tables, listening until people “had nothing else left to tell me.” That encounter shaped how she communicated the mandate downward. The Weir Legal review, which documented the VBA’s systemic failures through a series of consumer cases and was published under the organisation’s own name, made the diagnosis undeniable. “The strategy was to let it all hang out,” she said, “and let people have a look at everything we were doing badly.”
The pivot then moved into operations. Inspectors were redirected toward risk – water ingress, balcony waterproofing, wet areas – rather than covering territory without purpose. Targeted blitz inspections covering around 100 balconies in a fortnight replaced undifferentiated surveys. Staff were given explicit permission to focus rather than cover everything.
On enforcement, Cronin read the legislation and found tools the organisation had never used. One was a direction-to-fix power, allowing inspectors to compel a builder to rectify defective work before an occupancy permit was issued. “I don’t think we’d actually used it before,” she said. The other was prosecution of unregistered builders – operators with no licence, no insurance, and no accountability under the disciplinary framework. In her first year, the VBA ran 14 prosecutions. That rose to more than 30, and then to 65 underway at the time of interview.
The authorising environment question
None of this would have moved without an explicit mandate from above. Cronin is unequivocal about this, and it’s the part of her account most relevant to regulators in other jurisdictions.
“I would not have had the mandate to do what I’ve done if I hadn’t had the government one hundred per cent squarely behind me, recognising the regulator needed to change and basically saying to me: it needs fixing, go and fix it.”
She had an authorising environment that was clear, sustained, and public – ministers and the premier making statements of support outside Parliament, visible enough that staff knew the direction had political weight behind it.
The stakes are practical. At the VBA, the cultural disposition toward industry wasn’t held by bad actors. Instead, it was held by people who had built careers around a particular understanding of what the regulator was for. Changing that understanding without clear authority from above would have been absorbed by institutional inertia. The mandate shortened the process considerably.
What “central, not peripheral” looks like
By July 2025, the Victorian government had enough confidence in the reformed organisation to expand it. The Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC) was formed on 1 July 2025, absorbing the VBA, Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria (DBDRV), and the domestic building insurance function of the Victorian Managed Insurance Authority (VMIA) under the Building Legislation Amendment (Buyer Protections) Act 2025.
Enforcement, dispute resolution, and insurance now sit under one roof. The integration was designed to end a specific consumer experience: being redirected between agencies without any of them resolving the problem.
“The ping-ponging between different agencies has stopped and we have introduced much more seamless interactions for consumers within all of our operations,” Cronin said. “The integrated model is already working but it’s in its infancy and doesn’t solve everything overnight.”
The dispute resolution figure is the clearest output metric. Around 66% of disputes brought to the BPC’s free conciliation service are now resolved without going to court. Cronin’s target is 80 to 90%. “It’s not fair if the ability to get your building fixed depends on you being rich enough to afford lawyers,” she said.
“It’s not fair if the ability to get your building fixed depends on you being rich enough to afford lawyers.”
–Anna Cronin
The Buyer Protections Act adds the post-occupancy dimension. From 1 July 2026, the BPC can issue rectification orders for defective building work for up to 10 years after an occupancy permit is issued. Under the same act, a developer bond scheme for residential apartment buildings above three storeys will require developers to lodge a bond equal to 2% of the total build cost before applying for an occupancy permit – though the scheme will not apply to projects where a building permit is issued before 1 July 2027, meaning its practical effect lands in the following year.
On the new powers, Cronin is direct: “The mantra to industry is get it right the first time.”
The transferable lesson
When asked what she would tell a regulator in another jurisdiction whose organisation was where the VBA was in 2023, Cronin’s answer was telling: not a restructure, not new powers, but a public statement of intent.
“That’s why one of the most powerful things I did when I first started at the VBA was to publish a new Regulatory Policy Statement. It clearly sets out what our objectives are and who is responsible for what in the building system. The statement clearly signalled what our intent is and what we focus on.”
The lesson has limits, though. A policy statement solves nothing on its own. Reform without a clear, public statement of intent gives internal resistance no fixed point to organise against and gives external stakeholders no way to hold the regulator accountable for the change it has announced. The statement is the stake in the ground. The enforcement activity, the inspections redesign, the prosecutions – all of it follows from, and is measured against, that initial public commitment.
It’s all about making consumers, as Cronin put it, “central to the system, not peripheral to the system.” That distance is not a structural question. It’s a question about who the regulator believes it works for – and what happens when the answer requires action.
Anna Cronin is Chief Executive Officer and Commissioner of the Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC), Victoria’s consolidated building and plumbing regulator.
