Page 2882 - Week 08 - Thursday, 17 August 2017
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are trying to play this down. The minister in his statement used these quite alarming words:
The presence of aluminium cladding on a building should not be seen in isolation as an inherently risky addition to a building.
If we are to believe this sentence in Mr Gentleman’s statement, why are we having an investigation? If it is not inherently dangerous, why are we having a task force look at it? If it is not inherently dangerous, why is the minister for health making a statement, or a partial statement, about what is happening in relation to the women’s and children’s hospital?
As Ms Lawder has said previously, this government need to be honest about what the risks are and what they are doing about them. I have said in this place before that this minister, the minister for health, has become the minister for plausible deniability and the minister for being under-briefed. Again today she demonstrates this. Coming in here and making a statement about the state of the women’s and children’s hospital and the fire risk associated with this cladding material and not being able to tell the people of the ACT when they are going to remediate it is unforgivable. The people of the ACT, the staff at the hospital, the patients at the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the visitors and the people who clean the place should have better assurance.
The head of the AMA said on radio last night that he wants assurance; it should be happening now. And I agree with him. I do take the point that, yes, there is pressure on supply for this material, but I have not yet heard a reasonable explanation as to why they cannot take off the current dangerous material and leave it off until they can supply it. It might be more expensive, it might be a two-stage process, you might have to put up scaffolding, take it off, wait around and put it back on again, but it would be better for the people of the ACT, to give assurance of safety to the people of the ACT, to do that than to hang around for an indeterminate time while this government gets its act together.
It is very much like their failure to get their act together over the switchboard. Yes, we appropriated money for it in July last year, but then they spent literally months and months thinking about it, drawing up plans, having preferred tenderers on the never-never and not really acting until we had a fire. We have had a fire and we have had recent experience of a live evacuation from the hospital. We should not have to have that, and we should not have to rely upon that, because we now have a potentially unsafe situation in a very new building.
The point that Ms Lawder made is that this building was planned in 2010 and completed in 2012-13, well after the period when Mr Gentleman said they were concerned about this cladding, and they built a building with this cladding on it, even though they were concerned about it. There are questions there that need to be answered.
The other question which I think this minister has deftly avoided answering, regarding the question that I asked initially about cladding, is the question about the University of Canberra public hospital, which is entirely coated in cladding. Every vertical
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