Asked if he still supported this model at a fraught parliamentary committee hearing on Friday, Mr Chandler said: “I think that’s one of the answers.” “When I put my recommendation up, that will be one of the options but I’ve been asked to consider one or two variations on that,” he said. He said he would make a recommendation to the government within a fortnight. The Victorian government has proposed a $600 million fund to help compensate building owners needing to replace dangerous flammable cladding. The NSW government has not offered compensation and Mr Chandler said he did not support taxpayer cheques to fix previous behaviour. Government loans would be repaid, he said.

After the hearing, Mr Chandler told the Herald that he had been "appalled" to hear that strata owners were being offered commercial fixes to their defects that included interest rates of 8 per cent or more. The debt on such deals would soon double, he said. "I would like to see a solution early, so that there are fewer people," signing up for such agreements, he said. The amount of any government loan funding could be significant. The Strata Community Association NSW has suggested $1 billion could be needed to remedy buildings with flammable cladding. The cost of fixing significant defects across hundreds or thousands of buildings is unknown. The dangers of flammable cladding were exposed by the Grenfell fire in London. A cladding taskforce set up by the NSW government has since identified 553 high-risk buildings, of which 154 were high-risk residential high-rises. Mr Chandler's evidence before the parliamentary committee also included a call for major changes in the building industry.

“It’s time for the NSW building industry to be different,” he said, while lambasting the builders and engineers behind the evacuated Mascot Towers building in Sydney’s inner south. “When I walked across that job yesterday, I don’t think I’ve seen many buildings as poorly built as that,” Mr Chandler said of the Mascot block, which he visited on Thursday. “I’m quite certain that the builder didn’t know how to read any construction plans,” he said. But there was also tension during the hearing, as Mr Chandler was forced to defend the usefulness of his job, created by the Berejiklian government amid a crescendo of alarm about building quality, but which came with little direct power, staff or funding. Also in the hearing, Electrical and Trades Union of Australia NSW branch secretary Justin Page said the industry had growing concerns about unlicensed electrical work being carried out across Sydney and NSW.