Latest news with #Lilydale
Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Arrow Building Group collapses into voluntary administration - leaving projects in the lurch
A Melbourne building company has gone into voluntary administration, leaving a dozen projects across the city in doubt. Arrow Building Group appointed an administrator, Hamilton Murphy's Stephen Dixon on April 22. The company lists several projects as 'under construction' on its website, including a development of eight two-bedroom homes in Lilydale, eastern Melbourne. 'From forever homes to multi residential developments for investors, our skilled team work on a vast array of different projects,' Arrow Building Group's website says. Photos showed the underslabs and structural steel for the homes had already been installed. Other projects included homes in Heathmont, Dandenong and Windsor. A staff member declined to comment when reached by phone on Tuesday. In the financial year to March 2025, more than 2,600 Aussie construction companies became insolvent for the first time, up 23 per cent from the year prior. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Hamilton Murphy for comment. What's going wrong in the Australian construction industry? Several well-known companies in the industry have collapsed, including Clough Group, Probuild, and Porter Davis Homes. 'Australia's homebuilding industry is characterised by low-profit margins and fixed-price contracts, meaning that there is little headroom or mechanism for builders to absorb pressures such as rises in material costs and labour shortages,' explained Bradley Hastings, a building expert from the UNSW Business School. 'This means that many homebuilders have been operating at negative cashflows, where suppliers don't get paid, and projects are left unfinished.' He said that when a residential homebuilder goes bust, consumers become unsecured creditors and are at the bottom of the food chain after a lengthy insolvency process. 'The fallout does not stop at consumers, subcontractors also join consumers on the unsecured creditor's lists. 'Often, small or family-run businesses become unsecured creditors needing to cover the cost of their materials and staff if they want to continue to trade.' Mr Hastings said that unlike other large investments, such as superannuation, the construction sector has little regulation regarding how consumer funds are utilised and protected. 'When a homeowner places a deposit with a builder, this money can be spent for any purpose. 'In some cases, there have been stories of builders on luxurious holidays at the same time as homes go unfinished. 'More often, given the cash flow pressures across the industry, consumer deposits from one project are used to complete prior commitments.' He said a solution could be protecting consumer deposits with 'project accounts where consumer funds reside until they are drawn down by builders and subcontractors and the work is completed to standard. 'In the event that the builder goes bust, this money remains in place to pay subcontractors and continue the build. A side benefit of this approach is that it may improve the robustness of the construction industry, providing homebuilders with a motive to ensure that each project stands on sound financial footing.'
ABC News
07-06-2025
- Health
- ABC News
Meagan White chose surrogacy in order to become a mother, and now has two children
Maree Arnold has an extra special connection with her three-year-old grandson Winston and his newborn sister Phoebe. Ms Arnold carried and birthed both Winston and Phoebe — or Princess Phoebe as Winston calls her — as a surrogate for her daughter Meagan White and her husband Clayde. "You want to trust the surrogate that's carrying your baby with everything and who do you trust more?" Ms White said, while smiling at her mother. Ms White has a rare condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, which has prevented her from carrying her own children. "I was born without my uterus," Ms White said. "So [surrogacy] has pretty much been my only option." While Ms White has ovaries and produces eggs, she does not have the uterus to carry a baby. She and her husband, from Lilydale in northern Tasmania, started creating embryos through TasIVF in 2017. They also travelled to Canada where they created more embryos and pursued surrogacy. "We got to 23 weeks and the baby's kidneys didn't develop," Ms White said. When the Whites returned home, they looked into uterus transplants — which at the time was in the very early trial stage in Australia. "We were going to look into uterus transplants, as in mum transplanting her uterus to me," Ms White said. The mother and daughter flew to Queensland to investigate the transplant option. "They said that the operation would be simple for me but reasonably extensive for mum to make sure they removed the uterus with all the vessels intact, and that's when mum said, 'it might be easier if I carried'." Ms White and her husband, along with Ms Arnold and her husband Leigh, had to go through the altruistic surrogacy agreement process of counselling, contracts and IVF. Then on January 13, 2022, Ms Arnold birthed Meagan and Clayde's son Winston. After getting settled as a family of three, Ms White began to look again into uterus transplants in the hope of growing her family again. Then surrogate gran stepped back in. Ms Arnold, who has also had five of her own children, said the pregnancy process was different — not only a surrogate, but as a grandmother. "I'm a lot more careful," she said. "And the technology — the scans are different and all the apps that you get — it's different. "It's amazing that we could help and carry and make a family. "I think it's more common for an auntie or uncle to carry their nephew or their niece because it's that generation younger, but not grandparents so much." There weren't many surrogate options for Ms White, especially given Tasmania's surrogacy laws. In Tasmania, intended parents and their surrogate need to live on the island state at the time the surrogacy agreement is entered into. Anna McKie, from Surrogacy Australia, described the law as "archaic" and a "form of discrimination" against intended parents in Tasmania. "For a state that's already a bit more isolated, to have that as an extra, is just ridiculous," Ms McKie said. "You're the only state that says intended parents must have a surrogate in the same state. Whereas if you're a surrogate in Tasmania, you can carry for anyone, anywhere in Australia." Tasmania's Births, Deaths and Marriages registry has registered six parentage orders due to surrogacy in the past five years. Ms McKie said she believed the state restriction was from decades ago when IVF laws were first set up and the government wanted surrogates and intended parents to be close "for the best interests of the child". Both Ms White and Ms Arnold agreed the law was "unfair" and that it made surrogacy options harder for Tasmanian parents. A state government spokesperson said the government would continue to work with stakeholders to determine if changes were required. Surrogacy Australia is also one of three fertility groups calling for changes to Medicare rebate restrictions. As the law currently stands, Australians using assisted reproductive technology for surrogacy are excluded from Medicare rebates — even if, like in Ms White's case, it is the only way to have children. TasIVF medical director Dr Manuela Toledo said it meant those going through surrogacy had to pay thousands more for IVF services than those not using a surrogate. "Someone who's using IVF with a Medicare rebate would be paying a third the cost of someone who's going through surrogacy and having to pay for everything," Dr Toledo said. Dr Toledo said the IVF Group and the Fertility Society of Australia and NewZealand, which she is a board member of, were calling for the Medicare rebate exclusion to be changed. "Any Australian person with a Medicare card should be able to access fertility treatment based on their needs, not on their indication of medical treatment," Dr Toledo said. "We're not producing enough offspring to sustain our growing population and it's self evident that we need to help individuals and couples have families if that's what they'd like to do." Ms White said Medicare rebates were supposed to be there "to help those that medically need the help". "It would be fair to have it changed." A Senate committee that recently enquired into universal access to reproductive healthcare, recommended the Australian government implement the recommendations of the Medicare Benefits Schedule Review to remove the exclusion of IVF services for altruistic surrogacy purposes. The Australian government supported the recommendation in principle in February. A federal government spokesperson said the regulation of IVF was on the agenda for the next health ministers' meeting, to be held on Thursday.
