The West Australian, 4 Oct 2017
Here are some little-known facts about controversial builder Gerry Hanssen.
He’s trained 1000 apprentices in two decades, using two meticulously designed guides that list in picture and word format the tools and safety gear for each task needed to build a high-rise tower and showing, step-by-step, how to get the job done.
He’s also deeply spiritual, uncomfortably committed to telling the truth as he sees it, and — a rarity in an increasingly unforgiving world — he hires workers who have been in trouble with the law.
He will not fire you for making a mistake.
He says he wants to empower young people to become independent and self-governing and insists Hanssen trainees who have a Hanssen career will, from age 20 to 65, earn more than double a tradie elsewhere.
His antipathy to unions and his political affiliations — he’s a member of the Liberal and National parties — are well known.
“I’m really a socialist but I couldn’t be a member of the Labor party because of the CFMEU,” he jokes, though he doesn’t fully embrace suggestions that for fully rounded political experience he could join the Greens, too.
Aside from his building company Hanssen Project Management, which has forged a long-term relationship with apartment developer Finbar, Mr Hanssen is president of the Swan Chamber of Commerce and a strong supporter of Shalom House, a 120-bed rehabilitation centre in the Swan Valley run by his friend Peter Lyndon James.
Mr Hanssen lives at his Swan Valley Oasis Resort, which has a function centre and Supa Golf course and has plans for a hotel.
He is passionate about planning, preserving parkland and green spaces in the Swan Valley.
He employs 600 people from a wide range of nationalities, says he does not tolerate gender discrimination and his spiritual adviser and company chaplain, former pentecostal minister Tom Smilovitis plays an important role in nurturing Hanssen employees and helping them learn to “selfgovern”.
Mr Hanssen has zero tolerance for drugs.
He is committed to creating an “ethical” company that builds the best high-rise residential apartment developments economically, efficiently and on time.
Hanssen does this by creating “a lego kit” on site at a Hazelmere factory, where workers build the precast components of his buildings, many of which have won awards.
The plumbing, electricity, engineering and design are all inhouse, and Mr Hanssen estimates his Ikea-like system cuts 13 per cent from the cost of a job.
His three rules to work by are, in order, no unions, stay in control of buildability and pay fortnightly.
Each is a hangover from the late 80s and early 90s when in three short years he went from being a millionaire to broke, a misfortune he believes was compounded by the actions of unions and the Australian Taxation Office. The dark period that followed was compounded by the loss of his wife, Elke, who died of cancer in 2000.
He started again at 50, broke and bereft, and he will never forget it.
And he will never forget Lions Eye Institute founder Professor Ian Constable, who in 1992 took a chance on the fledgling Hanssen building company.
The budget was $6.5 million, funds painstakingly raised by Professor Constable, but the going rate for the building the institute needed was $8.5 million.
“I told Ian I will save you 20 per cent if I can have these three conditions, no deal with the unions, control over buildability and you must pay me fortnightly,” Mr Hanssen said, adding that the building was completed in a year.
“I told Ian I will save you 20 per cent if I can have these three conditions, no deal with the unions, control over buildability and you must pay me fortnightly,” Mr Hanssen said, adding that the building was completed in a year.
That, and meeting and striking a rapport with Finbar executive chairman John Chan in 1996, are the significant events Mr Hanssen credits with helping him get back on his feet.
“The truth is the truth,” Mr Hanssen says, adding that the buck stops with him and he is responsible. He cheerfully admits telling it like it is gets him into trouble.
“The truth is still better than anything else.
“It’s difficult to run an ethical company.
“That’s the biggest challenge we have. We can’t afford not to train people because we have to create a new generation of people with that work ethic.”
On the WorkSafe investigation that followed the death of Marianka Heumann, 27, a woman on a working holiday who fell 13 storeys to her death at Finbar’s Concerto tower in Adelaide Terrace a year ago, he has made it clear he wants nothing hidden.
“Just tell the truth,” he said. “I told my people I do not want anything else. Whatever the consequence of the truth, well, that’s it. Everything is my fault. I take ownership.”