Robert Cragg (aka Johno the Plumber) has spent twenty four years on the tools in Melbourne. His argument is that the standards problem in Australian construction has less to do with skill than with who is willing to protect the next trade through the door.
Ask Robert Cragg what is actually going wrong on Australian building sites and he does not start with skills shortages, material prices or approval timeframes. He starts with two words. Care factor.
Cragg runs Cragg Plumbing and Drainage in Melbourne, a commercial and domestic operation working across new homes, renovations, water and gas, roofing and stormwater. To a large following on Instagram he is Johno the Plumber, an account built on site standards, accountability and the state of the apprentice pipeline, delivered with enough humour that people watch it to the end.
Speaking on The Good Builder Podcast, his position held together across the hour. The industry does not have a knowledge problem so much as a transfer problem. And it does not have a skills problem so much as a care problem.
Failure is the teacher, and nobody wants to hear it
Cragg failed year twelve, went into landscape gardening at eighteen, and describes turning up to work convinced the world owed him a favour. He was pushed into subcontracting in the fourth year of his apprenticeship knowing nothing about tax, and ran up a significant debt with the ATO before working his way out of it.
That period shapes most of what he now says publicly.
“A saying that I have is failure is your best teacher. And I have failed. I have failed so badly over the years. And every time I fail, I’ll go back one step and I’ll go forward another two steps.”
“If you haven’t failed, then you haven’t learned anything.”
What frustrates him is that the lesson so rarely transfers. Older tradespeople offer what he calls subtle sprinkles of advice. Younger ones dismiss it, exactly as he did.
“If you’re a business owner like myself or anyone else, you need to trickle down that experience and your knowledge and pass that on to the other guys. You just gotta bring them up.”
“When you and I retire, we need the kids that are below us to be taking over this industry and leading from the front.”
What care factor actually looks like on a site
Care factor is his shorthand for something specific, and it is narrower than a general complaint about site standards. It is whether a trade thinks about the work of the trade that comes after them, and the work of the trade that came before.
“A big part of my frustration, which I’m actually trying to manage myself is just other trades coming in and not taking any care of what may affect the other trade further down the line or what’s already happened.”
He gave an example from a sporting pavilion job with twenty showers, each with its own tap set. Plasterers working in the same rooms put one foot on a ladder and the other on the tap sets, bending them down. By the time his crew returned to finish, the taps were ruined. The builder told him his people should have done more to protect their parts.
“It’s soft, solder brass… And that’s care factor right there.”
He described a second job where earthworks contractors struck a fire service and flooded underground services he had installed, leaving him with a vacuum truck bill running into thousands of dollars. Again, the response was that he should have done more to protect work that was already in the ground.
His read is that the two sectors behave differently.
“I find builders in the domestic sector are a bit more responsible and they do actually have a bit more of that care factor.”
The paperwork that makes the next trade accountable
His own answer is documentation, and it is deliberately front loaded.
“If I’m doing a drain, I will draw up the drain with the footing overlay on top of the drain. I’ll send it to the builder or whoever it is and I’ll say, you look at this, you approve it.”
Once the drain is in, he marks the same information physically on the ground so the concreters can see it without needing to open a file.
“You’ve got heaps of information here to see what my services are doing below ground that you can’t see… you just have to make people accountable. And that’s that care factor.”
If services still get hit after that, beyond the odd one or two, he back charges. The point is not the money. It is that the record exists before the damage happens, which is the difference between a back charge that holds and an argument.
What is a back charge in construction?
A back charge is a deduction a builder or head contractor makes from a subcontractor payment to recover the cost of rectifying damage or defective work caused by that subcontractor. It is applied after the damage is identified and the cost of the fix is known. Because it is a deduction from money otherwise owed, the records showing who caused the damage, and when, usually determine whether the charge survives a dispute.
Where the cost actually lands
The uncomfortable part of his argument is who ends up paying when nobody is accountable.
Where a trade has been paid and left the site, the builder is often the one who wears the rectification. That is a live tension in the relationship between builders and their subcontractors, and Cragg is unusually direct about the fact that it cuts both ways.
“I know of a lot of trades who have been paid and they’ve walked off the job and then all of a sudden something’s gone catastrophically wrong… the builder’s got to wear it and that’s eating into their margin at the end of the day. I don’t think that’s fair at all.”
Commercial work gives builders a partial answer through retention. On his own contracts, which he describes as running anywhere from $200,000 to $700,000, five to ten per cent held back covers a share of that exposure. Domestic work generally has no equivalent, which is part of why the same mistake produces a very different outcome depending on which sector it happens in.
Quoting a line he credits to another operator, he made the point that the damage is rarely one large event.
“You will go broke over time by slow little cuts, not by big open wounds.”
“Those slow little incremental cuts that you get that bleed you money. Next thing you know, two, three years down the track, you’re now 500,000 in the hole. How are you ever gonna get out of that?”
When his own crew causes the damage, he says the response is the same every time.
“I know this isn’t great, what’s happened here, but I’m going to do everything that I can to make it right… otherwise all you’re doing then is you just churning and burning relationships.”
Setting the bar with staff and holding it there
Asked what he would tell someone starting a trade business, he gave three things. Talk to the operators who have been through it. Pick a sector and stay in it, accepting that breaking into high end work means quoting a lot of jobs before anyone gives you a real go. And set the standard with staff immediately.
“With staff, you want to set the bar immediately and don’t let it drop. You will find guys in your company will do things to sort of lower the standard, and then the people around them will see that and they will start dropping the bar.”
“You need to set your values of what you want and just stick to them all the time.”
He is direct with his own people about it, and says he tells them so up front.
“Don’t get offended when I tell you what you’ve done there is not good enough and you need to do better than that. So go fix it up.”
He is also on the receiving end of it. He described being sat down by a builder client and told that his company was falling short in several areas, and said he walked out agreeing with every word of it. “It’s your livelihood at the end of the day.” He is careful to separate that from anything aggressive, describing his own approach now as more mature than it was years ago. It is a version of the same finding that keeps surfacing in conversations about what actually changes site culture. Clear expectations, held consistently, do more than any policy setting.
Licensing, and the trades that sit outside it
Pressed on where the structural gap sits, he pointed at licensing.
“Almost anyone can be a brickie or a concreter or a carpenter… where if you’re a plumber or electrician, you’ve got to be registered or licensed.”
In Victoria that is accurate. Plumbers may only carry out plumbing work in the state if they hold a current registration or licence, or are a plumbing apprentice, under the Building and Plumbing Commission. The Commission commenced on 1 July 2025 and now carries the functions previously held by the Victorian Building Authority.
The picture is different elsewhere. In Queensland the QBCC issues separate trade licence classes for bricklaying and blocklaying, concreting and carpentry, alongside roughly thirty others covering everything from waterproofing to steel fixing. So the gap he is describing is real, but it is a state by state gap rather than a national one.
That distinction matters for anyone working across borders, because licensing and compliance requirements do not travel with the tradesperson. His underlying point survives it intact.
“There needs to be sort of a check that’s going on.”
The relationship between clients and builders has changed
The part of the conversation that landed hardest was not about trades at all.
“There’s been a massive breakdown in the relationships between clients and builders.”
He described a job that finished, handed over, and then went sideways when the owners sold the house for less than they had hoped and told the builder they could not pay his final claim. His observation was that the builder had no connection to the sale price whatsoever, and would certainly not have been offered more had the sale gone the other way.
“Everyone’s got their heels dug into the sand so far.” He remembers the mid two thousands and early twenty tens differently, when owners turned up on site pleased to be there. That shift is measurable rather than nostalgic, and it shows up in the evidence that clients are more anxious than they used to be before a single trade sets foot on the block.
“We generally care about your place. We’re not trying to do a dodgy here or anything like that.”
The same instinct shapes which builders he works for. He says the ones he keeps are the ones who communicate, and that he can read the rest from the first email. A quote request that does not use his name usually means a price check, and he does not respond to it. He is equally blunt about the other side of that trade, describing jobs won years ago on price alone and the moment halfway through when it becomes clear the number should have been fifty thousand dollars higher.
What he thinks makes a good builder
Asked the question this publication asks every guest, he answered in one word.
“Integrity… just being really honest, like looking out for each other. Communication’s a big thing. Paying the bills is another big thing.”
It is a simple answer, and he is quick to say he is not the only one giving it.
“There’s plenty of guys out there who care just as much as me, if not more. It’s just that I can jump in front of a camera and do it.”
Nothing in his account requires a policy change, a new regulator or a better market. The drain overlay, the markup on the ground, the call made when his own crew causes damage, the standard he refuses to let slip. All of it sits inside one business, decided by one operator, largely at his own cost.
That is the uncomfortable part of the argument. It is also the useful one.
Frequently asked questions
Johno the Plumber is the online identity of Robert Cragg, a Melbourne plumber with twenty four years in the trade who runs Cragg Plumbing and Drainage, a commercial and domestic business covering new homes, renovations, water and gas, roofing and stormwater. The account is known for content on site standards, trade accountability and apprentice attitudes.
Care factor describes whether a trade takes account of the work of other trades on the same site, both the work already installed and the work that follows. In practice it covers protecting installed services and fittings, giving other trades usable information about what sits below ground or behind a wall, and taking responsibility when damage is caused rather than leaving it for the next party to absorb.
It depends on the contract and on the evidence. Where the responsible subcontractor is still engaged and the damage can be traced, the cost is commonly recovered through a back charge or from retention held under the contract. Where the trade has been paid and left the site, and no retention is held, the builder frequently absorbs the rectification cost. Domestic contracts often carry no retention, which is why the same incident can produce different outcomes in the domestic and commercial sectors.
No, and the requirements differ by state and territory. Plumbing and electrical work are separately licensed occupations across the country. Beyond those, coverage varies. Queensland licenses a wide list of trade classes through the QBCC, including bricklaying and blocklaying, concreting and carpentry. Victoria licenses and registers plumbers through the Building and Plumbing Commission and regulates building work through a different registration framework. Anyone working across borders needs to check the requirements in the state where the work is being performed.
Related articles
- Building Commission NSW just handed the industry a three item defect checklist
- What apprentices actually want from a building business and why it matters
Last updated 8 September 2026. Licensing and regulator references current at date of publication.
General information only. This article reports on a conversation held on The Good Builder Podcast and on publicly available regulatory information. It does not take account of the circumstances of any particular business and is not legal, financial or compliance guidance. Licensing requirements differ between states and territories and change over time. Anyone relying on the regulatory references above should confirm the current position with the relevant regulator.
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