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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-10-15 Daily Xml
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Aluminium Composite Cladding

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): My question is to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Why won't the minister share the information he has regarding high-risk buildings with relevant owners, occupiers, tenants and employees?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:19): Again, I think the Leader of the Opposition here has listed off different groups of people who need to be treated in a different way, but first and foremost, when it comes to building owners—

Mr Malinauskas: They all have a right to know.

The SPEAKER: The leader is called to order.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —building owners need to be told because they are the ones who are going to need to undertake the rectification. As I have just updated the house, they have now been sent notification. That has now happened.

Mr Malinauskas: Why not just give them the info?

The SPEAKER: Leader!

Mr Malinauskas: You've got it. Why not just let them know?

The SPEAKER: Order, leader!

Mr Brown: Why are you keeping it a secret?

The SPEAKER: Member for Playford, be quiet.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: Again, can I reiterate the fact that councils have now sent those notices to the affected building owners.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: Again, there is a duty of care upon property owners—

The Hon. V.A. Chapman interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Deputy Premier!

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —to let their tenants know. As I have stated publicly, where that obligation isn't met the government will step in and we will do so in a timely manner.

Mr Malinauskas: How about now? You could at least let them know.

The SPEAKER: Leader!

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: Again, this is a complex issue that we are dealing with—

Mr Malinauskas: You've got information; they want it.

The SPEAKER: The leader is warned.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —one that jurisdictions not only around the country but around the globe are having to come to grips with. There are many, maybe some within this chamber, who, now that they are in opposition—I must admit that their tune has changed since they were shoved out of office—think that this is somehow some sort of binary question, that buildings with cladding are all bad and buildings with no cladding are all good.

That kind of binary simplicity does not exist in this case, the difficulty being that the issue we are trying to grapple with at the moment is nonconforming cladding. It is already, by its very nature, not supposed to be on the side of a building. The difficulty is that it's actually not that easy to identify what is good cladding and what is bad cladding, what is cladding that is conforming to the specifications and should be on the side of these buildings and which ones aren't.

The refrain that is often used publicly, and potentially shouted across the chamber, is, 'Why not just take off a panel and burn it?' The real issue is that there is a degree of substitution. For instance, to look at a building and say, 'Well, let's pull off one panel, burn that and that means that every other panel is okay,' is not right. In fact, there are issues of substitution even within batches of cladding, especially those that are imported.

What we are trying to do is go through a risk-based approach to make sure that we have confidence that, when we get to the other end, we actually have a safe building, but also, in the rectification being undertaken, we don't actually solve this problem but create a different problem. The work that is going to need to happen to remediate this cladding is going to have to deal with the issues when taking the cladding off the wall. The cladding, for instance, is likely providing some degree of waterproofing. We will need to find a different solution for how we deal with that. It is likely that cladding is also there to provide a degree of thermal protection. We are going to need to deal with that.

Again, the other point that I would like to make is that there has been a lot of discussion about equating the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK with what exists here in South Australia. The lack of fire safety mechanisms and the lack of fire safety provisions, as well as the design and construction of that building in the UK, are not like in a building we have here. There are a whole host of reasons why the Grenfell fire happened and why it was as devastating as it was.

South Australians should rest assured that the system we have in place here in South Australia affords us a much higher level of protection. A lot of the in-built fire safety systems and the National Construction Code and our building fire safety systems that are in place are all designed to lower risk. This means that, here in our state, we can have a greater level of assurance that these buildings are safer than what happened during the Grenfell fire.

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