Page 1013 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 May 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The second improvement on the present situation is that, because there are significant differences in the level of hazard between bonded asbestos and friable or loose asbestos, the bill provides for two levels of training and qualification for asbestos removal. A class A removalist can work with all asbestos, but a class B can only work with the bonded asbestos.
The third improvement is the rules governing disclosure. If an asbestos report already exists it must be made available by the owner to a prospective tenant or purchaser and to tradesmen engaged to do construction or renovation on the premises. Where no asbestos report exists the property owner will only be required to provide the generic advice which essentially gives a likelihood or probability of the location of the asbestos in houses built before 1985. Fortunately, there is no longer any compulsion to provide a detailed report.
These changes reflect the advantages of taking the advice of an industry task force with practical knowledge and experience, instead of taking an ideological approach to the issue. I commend the members of the task force for their professional work and for focusing on trying to achieve the best balance between community health and cost. I also thank the previous minister and her staff for providing extensive and well-prepared briefings on this and other related legislation. The opposition will be supporting the amendments.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.09): This bill puts into place the recommendations of the Asbestos Taskforce which was set up following the passage of the 2004 asbestos legislation. We have passed a couple of bills relating to asbestos prior to this one in the past year-and-a-bit since I have been here. In the main, they have been remedial legislation drafted to avoid problems that came from the contradiction between the original broad-brush act established in 2004 and the position developed by the Asbestos Taskforce, that task force being charged with developing an effective and economically viable asbestos protection regime under the act in consultation with industry bodies.
In some ways then this bill marks the start of the scheme proper, and that can be seen in how this bill amends a number of acts. It amends the Building Act and the building regulations, where it provides for builders to do small amounts of asbestos-related work as long as they have had some defined training. It allows for owners to conduct minor maintenance activities. It also requires asbestos reports to be included in building approval applications and for asbestos control plans to be developed for those materials. It is clear that the legislation has paid careful attention to the practicalities of the scheme.
This bill amends the Civil Law (Sale of Residential Property) Act to require the inclusion of any current asbestos assessment report, if it can be found, with the proposed contract of sale or, failing that, the more generic asbestos advice. It seems to me that there might well be occasions when it would greatly assist a vendor to fail to find a current report and to furnish the generic advice instead. So I suggest there is a weakness in this approach in that the definitive asbestos assessments are not attached to the lease or kept on a register in any way.
It appears that we have ended up with this system because the original approach would have required building owners and managers to pay for exhaustive asbestos assessments
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .