Michael Hopkins has laid bricks across the UK, Germany and Australia. His take on how we build homes here is uncomfortable, but it is worth hearing out.

Michael Hopkins has laid bricks on three continents. He did his apprenticeship in the UK in the late 1980s, worked across Germany, and has spent the last 30 years bouncing between Europe and Australia. He now runs a dry mortar business in Victoria.

That gives him a perspective most people in Australian construction never get. He watches how a home goes up here, then compares it to what he saw finished in four weeks in Britain back in 1988. And the gap bothers him.

“We are way behind in a lot of construction methods, especially how we build homes,” Hopkins told The Good Builder Podcast. “It’s frustrating to watch.”

He is quick to say he is not having a go at Australia. If anything, the opposite. But his argument is worth sitting with, because it connects three problems the industry keeps treating as separate: build speed, build quality, and the toll the work takes on the people doing it.

Four weeks from frame to keys, in 1988

Hopkins starts with a memory from his apprenticeship. The home builder he worked for was using timber frames that arrived on the back of a truck, factory-made, with insulation already fitted.

“So you’re talking 150 millimetre timbers with plywood outside, insulation inside, and they’d have these up weather tight within two days, side by side,” he said. Electricians moved from one house straight into the next. Bricklayers built the outer skin while trades worked inside. So much of the work happened in a controlled factory setting rather than out in the weather.

“From the frames going up to completion, at the peak, we’d be handing over the keys in four weeks. Literally the house was finished in four weeks, ready to move into. And that’s going back to 1988.”

The point is not just speed. It was the insulation levels and the sequencing. Speed and quality were not a trade-off. They arrived together.

When Hopkins moved to Germany, he found a country further ahead again. In his estimate, the UK was 15 to 20 years behind German methods at the time, and he had assumed the UK was at the cutting edge.

Insulation is not just about the cold

One of the ideas Hopkins keeps returning to is that Australian builders and clients think about insulation the wrong way. Here, insulation gets framed as a winter problem. Overseas, and among a growing number of performance-focused builders closer to home, it is understood to work in both directions.

“When you insulate a home, it’s not just for the cold, it’s for the heat,” he said. “You could save thousands of dollars on heating and cooling.”

He points to a hospital he worked on in Wales as the most impressive building of his career. Inside skin of 150mm block, a 50mm insulation board cavity, then brickwork. Double glazed windows with a 25mm gap between panes. It was so well insulated that even through a Welsh winter, central heating was barely needed.

The knock-on effect is the part he wants builders to grasp. Less energy drawn to heat and cool a home means lower bills for the family living in it and less load on the grid. He argues you could design a home in Australia that needs almost no central heating and minimal cooling through summer, purely through design and material choices.

The maths clients do not see

Hopkins knows the objection before you raise it. Better windows and more insulation cost more upfront. His response is that clients and builders are looking at the wrong number.

“They just look at that and go, well, I’m going to spend an extra 10 grand on installing better windows,” he said. “But you’re not looking at what it’s going to cost to heat and cool your home.”

He runs the sum out loud. Skimp on insulation, then install oversized heating and cooling that costs, say, 12 grand a year to run, and over ten years you have spent 120 grand keeping the home comfortable. Spend a fraction of that on the fabric of the building instead and the running cost collapses.

He also makes a prediction that matters for the whole industry. The reason these methods feel expensive is that they are not yet standard here. “It’s like all technologies, they’re expensive in the beginning. But as soon as everybody adopts them, it brings the price down.” He watched it happen with UPVC windows in the UK, which replaced aluminium from the late 1970s, and one Victorian builder has already proven the same logic locally, using high-performance glazing to reach seven and eight star ratings. Aluminium frames create cold spots and hot spots because the metal transfers heat and cold straight through. UPVC and timber do not.

It is a familiar tension. Australia’s National Construction Code runs on the same floor-not-ceiling logic as building codes overseas, setting a minimum rather than a target. Meeting code and building a genuinely low-running-cost home are not the same thing.

Why Australia builds differently

Part of the gap, Hopkins argues, is structural. It comes down to how Australian home building is organised compared to the rest of the world.

Here, a developer sells lots and multiple builders move onto the one estate, each building separate houses with separate trades and separate deliveries. Overseas, he says, the developer is more likely to build the homes themselves with their own trades who stay on site continuously.

That difference shows up in productivity. On a European site he describes, silos of mortar sit on the job. A forklift driver keeps the bricklayers supplied, filling bins straight from the silo. Less mess, less dust, less cleaning up at the end, and less strain on the labourers hauling material around.

“You’re extending the life of the labourer as well,” he said. It is a phrase that captures how he thinks. He looks at a job site and sees the body doing the work, not just the wall going up.

The fragmentation also makes change harder. Australia’s residential sector runs on a small number of large builders and a very long tail of small and independent operators. Getting new methods adopted across that spread is a genuine challenge, and Hopkins believes it feeds the same conservatism that slows change across the wider industry.

“Australia is generally quite conservative when it comes to construction. It’s the old saying, if it ain’t broke, why fix it,” he said. “Well, it is in a way. It is broken and we do need to fix it.”

Working harder, not smarter

The clearest example Hopkins gives is one most builders will recognise instantly: pouring a slab.

Here, he still sees crews on their hands and knees screeding concrete by hand, a method that leaves a wavy finish and wrecks people’s backs. In the UK and Europe, he says, they use a petrol powered screed running on rails, one operator, glass-flat finish, and it is faster. A mate of his lines up nine or ten concrete trucks and screeds the lot in a fraction of the time.

This is where the human cost comes back in. Hopkins watched a slab crew recently and thought about longevity.

“I saw some guys the other day doing a slab, and he was probably about my age, in his 40s, and I couldn’t be doing that,” he said. “My back would be killing me. I reckon that’s part of the reason we lose people in construction.”

He has seen worse than sore backs. Labourers caught by concrete mixers, one young worker spun around holding a shovel, another knocked out cold when a shovel kicked back and broke his jaw. Small changes to method, he argues, remove a lot of that risk while lifting output at the same time.

Respect, pay and the trades pipeline

Hopkins is blunt about why the trades pipeline is struggling, and it ties back to how tradespeople are treated. In Germany, he felt respected in a way he never did in the UK or Australia. One builder there shook his hand every morning, thanked him every night, and handed him a beer at the end of the day.

“I know that doesn’t sound like much, but they just treat you with a little bit more respect,” he said. In Australia, by contrast, he feels tradespeople are still regarded as a rung lower.

Pay is the other half of it. Bricklaying wages, he says, have barely shifted since the 1990s in real terms. “If you compared a bricklayer’s wage from the 90s to now, it’s hardly moved. There’s no way it’s gone up with inflation.” His view is that bricklaying, like carpentry, should be a registered trade given how structural the work is, and that treating it as skilled and paying it accordingly is the only way to pull more people in.

He also names a habit that quietly corrodes the industry: not paying trades for completed work.

“The tradies will do work, and then the customer or the builder turns around and goes, no, I’m not paying, or I don’t think it’s worth that, and they only pay a fraction,” he said. He reckons he has personally been stung for tens of thousands over the years. His fix is a simple one borrowed from how other industries handle trust: money for a build sits in an independent account that needs both signatures to release, so neither party can shaft the other.

A tool builders can actually use

For all the frustration, Hopkins is practical about what a builder can do right now, and he points to one resource in particular. Think Brick Australia has a Home Comfort Calculator that compares construction types and puts a dollar figure on what each will cost to heat and cool.

The tool lets you see the difference between a lightweight timber frame with cladding, brick veneer, and double brick with a cavity, across summer and winter, in real running-cost terms. Hopkins says seeing the graphs lands the point in a way words never do.

“When you see the actual graphs on it, it’ll blow your mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re building in Tasmania or if you’re building in Darwin, the principles work the same.”

It is exactly the kind of thing a builder can put in front of a client who is balking at the cost of better glazing or insulation. Instead of arguing about the upfront number, you show them the ten-year one.

The Good Builder Take

None of what Hopkins describes requires reinventing anything. The methods exist. The tools exist. The maths already favours them. What is missing, on his read, is the willingness to stop building the way we have always built simply because it is the way we have always built. For a builder, the practical move is smaller than the whole-of-industry argument: pick one method that lifts quality or protects your crew, and prove it on a job.

What makes a good builder

Asked the question the podcast always ends on, Hopkins does not reach for anything about technology or method. He goes straight to character.

“Honesty,” he said. “If you’re going to say you’re going to turn up on Monday at seven o’clock, turn up on Monday at seven o’clock. If you can’t make it, make the phone call.”

Good communication, attention to detail, and builders who do not play trades off against each other. It is a fitting end from someone whose whole argument is that the industry improves when people work together rather than against each other, and when they are willing to look honestly at how things are done.

Frequenty asked questions

Listen to the full episode

Michael Hopkins joined The Good Builder Podcast to talk build methods, energy performance and the state of the trades. Listen to the full conversation on Spotify.

Last updated: 9 July 2026

The Good Builder provides news and analysis for Australia’s building industry. This article is general in nature and does not constitute professional or financial guidance.

Author: TGB Editorial