Sydney apartment construction needs to keep working: David Cremona, Meriton national construction director

Construction needs to keep working, urged David Cremona, the national director of construction at Meriton, on Sydney radio today. He advised Australia's biggest builder Meriton have around 300 staff plus 3500 workers caught up in the construction industry shutdown that closed sites from Monday morning across Sydney. The NSW government’s announcement over the weekend there would be a two week building shutdown. Harry Triguboff, who has a dozen apartment buildings under construction, said that the building industry had been keeping the economy buoyant. "If you stop that you kill everything. By us building you keep everything going, including suppliers,” he said. “It’s terrible, because if you go along the freeways the only traffic is trucks and tradies," he told The Australian. “All we are doing is counting how many people have it,” he said. “There is a short supply of accommodation in apartments. We have dropped the numbers we are building by half,” Triguboff said. Cremona told 2GB's Ray Hadley that he'd been constructing faster than approvals were being processed under the Berejiklian government. He said there would be a $750 million direct weekly hit to the NSW economy, plus an indirect $2 billion hit through the supply chain if the fortnight shutdown continued. "We have means to manage the outbreak.... if we want this V-shaped re-bound, the NSW Government needs to take housing industry seriously," Cremona said. "It has been an absolute joke ever since Berejiklian has been incharge approvals have been coming down... I'm building quicker than my town planners are getting approvals," Cremorna said The development lobby group Urban Taskforce said the close-down of construction in NSW was an "overreach" that will cost the economy billions of dollars. The NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has so far withstood the backlash with word leaking that the covid cabinet was split with opposition to the move from Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, the Health Minister Brad Hazzard, and Jobs Minister Stuart Ayres. “Having the risk of thousands of people being mobile at one time, many of them coming from communities that have had cases, was too big a risk,” Ms Berejiklian told a press conference on Monday. “The Treasurer and key senior public servants are meeting with the construction sector daily to make sure that when they go back to work there are safe places,” she said. “We can’t have people, who may not have symptoms, visiting multiple worksites, visiting sites with hundreds of workers and spreading the disease.” Multiplex will have about 2000 people out of work over the next fortnight. BIS Oxford Economics estimated about 280,000 construction sector workers will be directly impacted, with more indirect layoffs in the transport, manufacturing and wholesale sectors. Melbourne’s second wave of Covid-19 saw onsite workers for major construction sites scaled back to 25 per cent of normal workforce. Smaller projects were allowed to proceed with up to five people per site, while large-scale government projects had their workers onsite halved.