Dear Ms Holmes

This submission is on behalf of a newly formed entity, the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), a peak organisation of organisations with a commitment to a sustainable built environment.

ASBEC has evolved out of a series of workshops held conducted late in 2003 by the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation. These workshops recognised the need to establish an organisation to be the common voice of the building and construction industry on sustainable built environment issues.

On 30 April 2004 the ASBEC Steering Committee resolved to incorporate and adopt a constitution and rules that would ensure perpetuity beyond it current members. At the same time, ASBEC has been developing a priority action agenda.

It is unlikely that ASBEC would be in the position it is now without the contribution of the ABCB. The hosting of the ASBEC secretariat for an initial six months by the ABCB has been pivotal in placing ASBEC on a solid foundation for the future. It should be noted that ABCB saw the need to provide this support whilst not being an ASBEC member itself.

ABCB has shown foresight and leadership in providing this support. In the near future, sustainability will be on the ABCB agenda and it will now have a ready made soundingboard and proponent giving a more consistent industry voice. Similarly, ASBEC will be engaging other government agencies including the Department of Environment and Heritage (see attached letter).

The ASBEC submission with respect to reform of building regulation can be summarised as follows:
•	A strong ABCB is central to national building regulation reform
•	The ABCB is a very good model for non-regulatory reform of the building and construction industry
•	ABCB must be well resourced in order to keep ahead of trends to non-uniform building controls (for example local government one-off responses to sustainability)
•	ABCB has show great vision and leadership in an area that is not directly related to its core functions but affects the efficiency of the industry generally and should be encouraged to do more of this type of non-regulatory reform and industry stimulation initiatives.
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