Page 1112 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
As I have said previously, the opposition will be supporting this bill today and I look forward to its passage.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (4.37): The Greens will be supporting this bill today. Mr Fluffy loose-fill asbestos has been haunting this city and our community for many decades now. It has brought great distress to thousands of home owners and tenants over two separate time periods, decades apart—at the time of the initial clean-up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then again over recent years during this final clean-up.
It has been of serious concern amongst workers in our building industry who have had fears about whether their health has been impacted by renovations and maintenance work they have done on Mr Fluffy homes. There has been fear and concern across the broader community, as well. Many of us looked up the map of affected properties on the Canberra Times website the day it was released to see if we had ever lived in or visited a Mr Fluffy home. I know many people in the community are affected by that in one of those various categories.
There has also been a large financial burden on the community. The most recent clean-up alone will have cost the ACT government around $290 million, from a net perspective, by completion. That is also a large amount of money that every ACT resident will be contributing to.
Today we are close to the end but we are not there yet. As of 21 December 2019, 978 properties had been demolished, which is around 95 per cent of the affected properties. We will not quite get to the end during this term of the Assembly; there are still a small number of properties where the owners have not yet entered into the government’s buyback plan or have conducted their own demolition. This bill puts in place arrangements for managing this final small group of properties.
The bill includes two types of measures: firstly, there are measures to protect tradespeople and other service providers, as well as the wider community. These include, for example, a requirement that an asbestos management plan is kept in a display case at the front of the property to make sure tradies or other service providers who come to do maintenance work or other services understand what precautions they need to take to stay safe. Secondly, there are measures to make sure that the small number of remaining homes are eventually demolished. This includes an end date of mid-2025 when compulsory acquisition and demolition may take place.
It is important to recognise that some of these measures will have a direct impact on the remaining owners. It is a difficult decision to bring in the option of compulsory acquisition, as well as some of the more intrusive measures. However, at the end of the day, these remaining Mr Fluffy homes cannot be forgotten and be allowed to gradually drift back into circulation through rental or sale. Workers also need to be protected.
That does, however, leave the current responsible minister and future ministers through to 2025 with a significant moral obligation to make sure these powers are
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video