Page 759 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 17 March 2015
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scheme does not fit a range of people, as it certainly does. But it is a one-size-fits-all approach to Mr Fluffy that certainly means that a number of people are disadvantaged.
These were, as I said, litigated to an extent in the previous debate that we had in this place on the Mr Fluffy legislation. There were 62 recommendations put forward, but only 16 were agreed to by the government, which means that there are residents out there who are experiencing significant trauma. A number of those issues include people that want to stay in their homes for longer and who are elderly. I know the government has picked a five-year period, but to me that seems arbitrary. If elderly residents are able to remain in their homes, why is it for five years? Why not for a longer period—a period that would allow them to perhaps see out their lives in those homes? It seems that all we are doing is delaying the inevitable.
There is the issue of fairness regarding people who want to return to their blocks but where it is unlikely they will be able to because it will be unaffordable. There is the ever-looming threat from the government, which says that the scheme is voluntary, but, ultimately, the government has said that all the houses will be demolished. So the fear is that if people do not sign on, sometime after 30 June this year there will be a knock on the door, their house will be condemned and those people will suffer a significant financial loss.
We have called for a number of actions from the government to resolve this issue. I reiterate my call for an inquiry into Mr Fluffy. That was certainly a recommendation that came from the bipartisan committee. We need to understand what happened here, what went wrong and have that fulsome inquiry. For many people that would be a very important part of the healing process, not just for them but for the whole community.
We will support this legislation today that gets the business of the buyback scheme moving. I do not resile from the fact that I and my colleagues—and, indeed, members of the public accounts committee, both Liberal and Labor—obviously have some significant concerns that the entirety of the plan as it is structured is somewhat inflexible.
I will touch on another issue. I hope that the Chief Minister, in closing this debate, will go to this. In the last couple of days a number of constituents have come to us who dispute the fact that their homes are Mr Fluffy homes. There are cases where people have bought a block that had a home on it that turned out to be a Mr Fluffy home but they have demolished the home that was there. Maybe a retaining wall or a small element of the subfloor remained, and they built a new home on that block. Essentially, what they have is a completely new home. They have invested a lot of money, a lot of heart and a lot of soul into building a new home on a block, and they are now being told, “That’s a Mr Fluffy home.” They have had numerous checks for amosite asbestos and it has all come up negative. But they have been told that the house has to be demolished.
It seems to me that that is an extreme response that the government needs to look at very closely, because we will end up with something that will be an enormous cost to the individuals concerned and also an enormous cost to the community. If we are
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