New NSW building law could be a game changer for apartment safety Matthew Bell, Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Studies for Construction Law, University of Melbourne This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Three years have passed since a cladding-fuelled fire claimed 72 lives in Grenfell Tower, London, on June 14 2017. The construction industry and its regulators around the world are still grappling with how to create effective regulations to ensure dwellings are built to keep their occupants safe. The New South Wales Parliament passed two important bills last week: the Design and Building Practitioners Bill 2020 and the Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Bill 2020. This put in place two important pieces of the “jigsaw puzzle”, as NSW Better Regulation Minister Kevin Anderson put it. The Residential Apartment Buildings Bill in particular could be a game changer and is the focus of this article. The law is expected to take effect on September 1 2020.  New powers to order serious defects be fixed The centrepiece of the legislation is an ability for the Secretary of the Department of Customer Service to order the correction of “serious defects” in residential apartment buildings. In practice, the NSW building commissioner and his