Page 4311 - Week 13 - Thursday, 4 December 2014
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Throughout our deliberations and in the scheme’s design, the government has adhered to the core principles of safety, certainty and fairness.
On safety and certainty, there is a clear and unavoidable need for each of these houses to be demolished and for a buyback mechanism which provides each Mr Fluffy owner and resident with the opportunity to leave their home now. On fairness, there is an offer which, in the here and now, is fair to the families concerned through a buyback price which ignores the asbestos and gives them a way forward to buy a comparable Mr Fluffy free home, and an economic strategy which, in the longer term, is fair to the ACT community through the recouping of some of the scheme’s costs. On these two principles, the scheme is uniform and the government’s resolve is firm.
The scheme is flexible. Older residents or others who are not ready to leave are being offered flexibility in the timing of settlements out to a period of five years in order to coordinate payments with their future plans. Families do not need to leave their home by 30 June 2015, as some may believe. The only requirement by that date is that they have opted in for a valuation to occur, as some 650 owners have done already.
The government have been deliberately open in indicating the necessity to require future preventative measures for these homes. We are not hiding our intention. And it is impossible to give generic advice on these requirements. It is likely that individual homes will be required to have their own asbestos management plans in place.
Members should bear in mind that the community response is already making life difficult for those still living in Mr Fluffy homes. Some families and friends no longer visit; personal services are refusing to enter; access to trades for even minor maintenance is becoming prohibitively expensive. For a great number of these people, time remains of the essence.
Over the last three months, the task force has met individually with affected families, often more than once, to discuss their circumstances. Phone and email contact by the task force with families numbers into the thousands. These conversations have canvassed the same issues which have emerged through the PAC inquiry. The Treasurer tabled the government’s response to that this morning. In the design of the scheme, we have sought to provide a fair means for owners to return to their block at an updated market price which reflects the major investment the government is making to clean the block and the future value that properties with the newly built homes will attract.
We have considered various options to demolish homes without acquiring the land, including those canvassed in the report and speculated on by the media in recent days. While it is impossible to predict with certainty the behavioural responses to these options, the Treasury modelling suggested this would add more than $50 million to the net cost of the scheme. I do not believe that when we are asking the community to shoulder costs of between $300 and $400 million we can simply waive away an additional $50 million burden, and therefore we can only progress options which will not hit the budget in this way.
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