By Leith van Onselen

In late May, ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a segment on the cheap combustible cladding that has covered potentially thousands of buildings across Australia, that last November sent a Docklands building into a towering inferno:

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: When a cigarette was left on a balcony table in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct last year, it took fewer than 15 minutes for 13 storeys to go up in flames. The problem was the cheap cladding that covered the entire apartment building. It didn’t meet Australian standards and should never have been used. But since that fire, it’s emerged that potentially thousands of buildings in Australia could be covered with the same material… MICHAEL O’CONNOR, CONSTRUCTION, FORESTRY, MINING & ENERGY UNION: This product is rife. It’s used in buildings throughout Australia. All the information we’re receiving, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, every capital city, we believe this product is used in many buildings and particularly in high rise buildings… When it comes to building materials and particularly imported building materials, it looks like no-one’s in charge. So we have a flood of building materials being brought into this country, some claiming to meet Australian standards and we know they don’t, some not even bothering to make a claim of meeting Australian standards. And when you go to the different authorities, whether it’s the ACCC, whether it’s the building code authorities, everybody’s trying to say it’s somebody else’s problem… In 2011 the Victorian Auditor-General discovered 96 per cent of building permits issued by surveyors didn’t have proper documentation, leaving “little assurance” surveyors were “adequately enforcing building and safety requirements”…

Over the weekend, Engineers Australia released a new report claiming that 85% of strata units built in New South Wales were defective on completion, and arguing that a major fire in a Sydney high-rise is inevitable. From ABC News:

Some of the report’s key findings were that New South Wales had Australia’s worst building certification system and 85 per cent of strata units were defective on completion. The report also found that New South Wales insurance companies reported repair costs of an additional 27 per cent. One of the report’s authors, engineer Robert Hart, said the situation was only going to get worse. “There are something like 20,000 new units coming on stream over the next few years, and we know they are being done by developers who are totally inexperienced and [have] no real interest in anything other than making money and this is causing major concerns,” Mr Hart said. “There is a raft of issues. It is occurring daily but no-one is inspecting this stuff. “This is what is going to cause a major incident at some point. “There are some very clever fire engineers in this city and they have the most appalling stories.” Mr Hart described the major problems as:

• Fire separation between apartments;

• Almost no fire gaps installed correctly;

• Fire dampers that prevent the spread of smoke are very seldom installed correctly;

• Electrical installations not properly done. Consulting engineer Charles Rickard said the major conclusion from the report was that the building system in New South Wales had “broken down”…

Australia’s new found fondness for high-rise apartments has been touted as not only a solution for housing affordability, but also as a way to save the environment by reducing sprawl, as well as saving the economy by filling the construction void as the mining investment boom unwinds.

Instead, all we have gotten are a bunch of ugly, expensive, and shoddily built high-rise projects, whereby $400,000-plus doesn’t just buy you a tiny shoebox in the sky, but also potentially your own private crematorium.

Oh well, at least it will add to GDP, given the cost of repairing/rebuilding these projects [/sarc].

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