Stork Wescon Aust P/L v Morton Engineering Co P/L [1999] QCA 61

[Stork Wescon Aust P/L v. Morton Engineering Co. P/L]

1 In the south-west corner of this State there is a facility called the Ballera Gas Centre. Natural gas is piped there from many wells and is subjected to treatment processes to make it fit for sale; when treated the gas is to be pumped out to distant markets. The respondent made a contract with the appellant to make and instal part of the equipment at the site and is attempting to recover from the appellant what is said to be money due to it for its work. In these proceedings the appellant says that the respondent cannot succeed because the work was done without a licence which Queensland law requires.

2 This question arises in the context of an application, unsuccessful below, made by the appellant to cancel a notice of intention to claim charge given under the 1974. The case does not involve any question of interpretation of that statute, however, but is concerned with the effect of legislation whose purpose is to regulate the building industry in Queensland. Work in the building industry can have to do with manufacturing and other industrial enterprises; a factory is a building. But the appellant would have the relevant statute and regulation applied so as to catch activities which one would not ordinarily think to be those of the building industry and to catch, in particular, the whole of the respondent's work in making part of the plant we have described. If this is so, then the 1991 and the Regulation made under it have a wider scope than they have previously been understood to have. The important powers of regulation in relation to the building industry, including issuing and cancelling licences (ss. 34 and 48 of the Act) and directing that defective work be rectified (s. 72) would, if the appellant's contentions are correct, be applicable to highly technical work outside the building industry, such as the provision of equipment for making chemicals and refining metals. Indications can be found within the statute and regulation that it was not envisaged that work of that kind would be regulated as part of the system for controlling the building industry. The trade representatives on the Queensland Building Services Board, prescribed by s. 10 of the Act, come from the Master Builders Association and the Housing Industry Association, people who presumably would have no relevant expertise outside the building industry. Further, the Queensland Building Services Authority Regulation 1992 ("the Regulation") provides for 28 types of specialised licences which seem to relate to work in the building industry, in the ordinary sense.