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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-08 Daily Xml
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Aluminium Composite Cladding

Mr BATTY (Bragg) (14:56): My question is to the Treasurer. When will dangerous flammable cladding be removed from the Air Apartments? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr BATTY: On 27 November 2023 I wrote to the Treasurer requesting that he expedite payments under the ACP cladding limited loan scheme to enable work to remove dangerous flammable cladding to begin. I have not received a response and no payment under the scheme has been made. On the weekend a large fire broke out inside the high-rise building in my electorate.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer) (14:57): I am happy to respond on this issue because the issue of combustible cladding has been a concern, particularly for apartment buildings—not exclusively apartment buildings, but particularly apartment buildings—for a number of years. Those concerns have grown because the responsibility of council to enforce the requirement that combustible cladding be removed and replaced was coming to a head, particularly during the course of 2020 and 2021. When we came to government, we took a different view from the previous Liberal government that we would make a loan scheme available for the residential properties that had not yet dealt with their properties.

Probably for good reason, perhaps to manage a potential perception that there may be some sort of conflict, I have not taken a leading role in managing the implementation of the scheme, albeit the South Australian Financing Authority is responsible for the scheme, and that is principally because I was in receipt of repeated—and I say this in the nicest way possible—frequent and voluminous representations from the presiding officer of the strata group of an apartment block in my electorate, who would be well known to many people in this chamber.

I didn't want there to be a perception that because I was now Treasurer and I have affected apartment buildings in my electorate suddenly we were proceeding with this, so it has remained the purview of the Minister for Planning. I am happy to try to find out why those payments have been delayed. I had heard, not by virtue of your correspondence but elsewhere, that works had already commenced, I think, on the Air Apartments but they have not yet been completed, which is I guess some decent news. But the fact that a fire breaks out in a building which may not have been fully remediated yet is of concern and I will take up the legitimate query of the member and find out where it's up to.

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