COURTNEY HOUSSOS, SHADOW MINISTER FOR BETTER REGULATION & INNOVATION: Hi, Courtney Houssos here, I’m the Shadow Minister for Better Regulation and Innovation, I’m here to talk about the Auditor General’s report, that’s been released today on flammable cladding. The Auditor General’s report shows us that the Government’s response has been slow and haphazard, the majority of NSW buildings with dangerous flammable cladding still have dangerous flammable cladding on them and that includes 50% of the governments own buildings that hadn’t had it removed, five years after the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The Auditor General told us that this requires an urgent response and yet under the government’s signature program, we’ve seen the only work done has been to bolt dangerous flammable cladding back on to NSW apartment buildings. Of those five initial buildings identified in the Government’s program, one has already dropped out and there has been no flammable cladding actually removed from apartment buildings.

The Auditor General’s report also shows us that there was no enforcement of the ban that was announced of dangerous flammable cladding and that they might have banned it but no one is actually enforcing it. The Auditor General also found that no work has been done on those buildings that were identified as low risk, so the scale of the problem is still yet to be ascertained.

Happy to take questions.

JOURNALIST: Were you aware of the low risk category issues and in fact this 536 buildings out there categorized as low risk, there seems nothing has been done about them and there’s no plan for what to do with them?

HOUSSOS: It’s clear that the government’s response has been slow and haphazard and inconsistent and the lack of the central agency coordinating the government’s response has been a huge problem. This is the latest revelation, which is that low risk flammable cladding hasn’t been identified, but there’s been problems with providing apartment owners with certainty about what actually needs to be remediated right from the very beginning.

JOURNALIST: And low risk obviously isn’t as alarming but these buildings will still need remediation, this is still going to impact hundreds of families.

HOUSSOS: So what is clear is that the government still five years after the Grenfell Tower tragedy still has not identified the scale of the problem. That dangerous flammable cladding is across NSW apartment buildings and they still don’t have a definitive list of where that dangerous flammable cladding is, and that more work might be required to actually remove it.

JOURNALIST: How is it that the task force’s own experts determined it as low risk and yet the Auditor General’s finding it as potentially unacceptable fire risk on those, you know, more than 500 low risk buildings, I mean, how does it come to be such a different assessment of the risk level?

HOUSSOS: So this is just another symptom of the government’s failure to have a comprehensive and coordinated response to dangerous flammable cladding. We’ve had questions raised with advice about provided to apartment owners about the requirements for remediation, we’ve had problems with the actual getting it off the buildings, but now we’ve got questions about the status of the dangerous flammable cladding itself. It is clear that dangerous flammable cladding must be removed from NSW apartment buildings and the NSW Government has failed to properly do that.

JOURNALIST: A lot of local councils are also contained in that Auditor General’s report, I think it’s about nine and they had a lower rate of identifying the buildings, I think it’s 40% of the top 12,000 buildings they had. What do you think needs to happen the local council level?

HOUSSOS: What we saw in other states is a central government agency actually take control. In Victoria they established the Victorian cladding agency which actually coordinated this work. In NSW what they have tried to do is push it off onto councils, push it, shuffle it between departments, and that’s meant that the response has lapsed, that key central coordination that’s required.

JOURNALIST: So you’re saying we need an agency, not a taskforce?

HOUSSOS: I think what the Auditor General tells us today is that the Government’s response over five years has been slow and haphazard and that has had real consequences when NSW apartment owners who still have dangerous flammable cladding on their buildings. More than 50% of the dangerous flammable cladding that was on buildings five years ago is still there and that’s because the government hasn’t coordinated a proper response. That means that they have been pushing it back onto councils to do the work, they’ve been pushing it between departments, they haven’t had a clear response to this huge problem.

JOURNALIST: What would Labor do in terms of addressing issues so from next year onwards, if you got in what would you set up a new sort of body to handle it?

HOUSSOS: Look, there is still a year until this election and apartment owners can’t wait another year for this problem to be fixed. But there is a State Budget coming up in June and the government can act to fix this problem now.

JOURNALIST: Just quickly, another protest on the Sydney Harbour Bridge are these new laws not working?

HOUSSOS: The protests on the Sydney Harbour Bridge today were hugely disruptive for workers and their families just trying to get to work. We sympathise, obviously with these families who are just going about their day to day work. We are waiting to see whether the protesters will be charged under these new laws but Labor did support those laws when they went through the parliament last week. We think that these kinds of protests ultimately undermine the causes that they’re trying to pursue.

Thanks everyone for coming.