Page 4314 - Week 13 - Thursday, 4 December 2014
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and on thousands of Canberra families. Indeed, it is also present in homes outside the ACT, extending the suffering to families in New South Wales and potentially elsewhere.
This suffering has been acute, and I want to acknowledge the pain, the stress and the heartache that people in Mr Fluffy homes have endured and the flow-on effects to their families and friends and communities. It has displaced people from their homes. It has affected people’s psychological and physical health. It has ruined people’s belongings. It has made people fearful and uncertain about the future, it has made people sick and it has endangered lives.
We have all heard the familiar, terrible story: a family are one day living in their home, going about their everyday lives; the next day they suddenly learn that their home is dangerously contaminated, uninhabitable in the long term, and on top of that they have the added stress that they could have been exposed to a toxic substance.
The tragedy is comparable to a natural disaster: over a thousand homes are irreparably damaged and need to be demolished. Over a thousand families are displaced and need, to some degree, to rebuild their lives.
Taking action to address the Mr Fluffy legacy is vital to offer a solution to those who are affected so that they can repair and rebuild and get on with their lives, as well as to remove the toxic legacy from Canberra so that no-one else will have to endure the hardship of living in a Mr Fluffy contaminated house.
Twenty-five years ago the commonwealth designed a program to remove Mr Fluffy asbestos from homes, in an effort that we now know was unsuccessful. Today a generation of Canberra residents is having to deal with that legacy again. That is not something that we can let happen to people again in the future.
The government’s loose-fill asbestos task force, taking advice from licensed asbestos assessors, Safe Work Australia and other experts, has concluded that demolishing the affected Mr Fluffy houses is the only enduring solution to the risk posed by the presence of loose-fill asbestos. Hundreds of asbestos assessments examined by the task force have shown that the remaining asbestos in Mr Fluffy homes is consistently penetrating living areas and that the houses are always susceptible to living area contamination as they age and are affected by climatic variations.
The task force ruled out alternative options such as further cleaning or sealing of the asbestos, as they are considered unlikely to be successful and in any case would be extremely intrusive. As sad as it is, demolition of all the affected houses is the only way to deal with the issue once and for all. The government buyback scheme is designed to ensure this occurs and at the same time to compensate the people who are displaced from their homes.
On this note, I see that the committee report raises the idea of people being allowed to stay in their homes in special circumstances if that is what they choose to do. This recommendation is very difficult to reconcile with the firm scientific advice about the ongoing danger of those contaminated houses, not just to the people living there but to the people who may visit or people who may own the house in the future.
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