Page 3982 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 20 September 2017
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The course of the debate over the past few weeks has led to the need for a motion because this ACT Labor-Greens government has, once again, demonstrated its contempt for the people of Canberra by neglecting basic safety and failing to monitor the use of aluminium cladding on buildings in the ACT.
It is hard to understand why, when there has been such an awareness of fire risks posed by this particular type of cladding for quite a number of years, the ACT Labor-Green government has chosen to continue to install some of this cladding on to their own buildings. The time has come when the government needs to be open and transparent and tell the people of Canberra what the government knew, when it knew it, and why the flammable aluminium cladding was approved, given that the government was already aware of the fire risks for some ACT government buildings. This government should be up front about the risks and what it is doing about them.
In his ministerial statement of 17 August this year, the minister stated that the ACT government has been “actively monitoring the use of aluminium cladding for over a decade”. However, the minister could not tell Canberrans in that statement why it would be monitoring the use of the cladding, how he had been monitoring the use of cladding and what the ACT government may have been doing with the monitoring.
I imagine that if the minister could tell us these things, the ACT government would have had the foresight to ensure that any hospital planned for women and children would not have been built with this cladding. Of course I am referring to the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children where it has already been confirmed that 10 to 15 per cent of the exterior cladding is of this particular type of highly flammable cladding.
The minister also told us in his statement of 17 August that:
Since 2009 the ACT government has been working on specific measures to address the fire safety risks associated with external wall cladding.
If that is the case, why does the ACT government find itself suddenly undertaking an urgent audit of aluminium cladding on all ACT government buildings? What exactly has it been doing since 2009 if all of a sudden it now has to undertake an urgent audit?
Back in 2009-10 ACT officials raised the issue of external flammable wall cladding with other jurisdictions nationally through the Australian Building Codes Board. That was according to Mr Gentleman’s statement on 17 August. The government did not say what issues were raised or what the ACT government did to address awareness and compliance in the ACT following on from that. What did the ACT government do to proactively address their concerns at a local level? As we all know, compliance is the responsibility of the ACT government.Why did it take a terrible, tragic 2017 fire to mobilise the ACT Labor-Greens government suddenly into urgent action? What has been happening since the 2014 fire at Docklands in Melbourne or the many other fires attributed to aluminium cladding?
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