Cladding on Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra hospital is combustible, the Queensland government has confirmed.

The health minister, Cameron Dick, said the government would speak to experts about how to deal with the problem. But he was confident the hospital was safe, saying it was well built and fitted with sprinklers and fire alarms throughout.

“Every building in Queensland has combustible material in it,” Dick said. “We have to determine what is the risk and what is the response to that risk.”

It comes on the same day that a Senate inquiry heard evidence that widespread fraud was being used to certify unsafe building products across the country.

The same inquiry heard only three of the 71 buildings used to house G20 leaders in Brisbane in 2014 complied with safety standards.

The Senate inquiry has been given new urgency by the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London, an inferno caused largely by the use of unsafe, flammable external cladding.

Flammable cladding is considered “the canary in the mine”, the inquiry heard, and almost all states and territories had instigated audits or taskforces to assess the extent of its use in buildings across the country.

The Senate inquiry is exploring the impact of deregulation, privatisation and globalisation on the proliferation of unsafe building products since the 1990s.

It has heard evidence that the changes have reduced mandatory inspections, weakened the certification regime, allowed for non-compliant products to be imported and caused Australia’s building standards, which can take up to four years to update, to lag badly behind changes in the industry.

Many witnesses have advocated for the re-regulation of the industry and almost all have called for a nationally consistent approach to overcome regulatory gaps and loopholes that exist state-by-state.

On Wednesday, the inquiry heard a disturbing example from the G20 meeting in Brisbane three years ago.

An audit of the buildings used to house world leaders including the then US president, Barack Obama, revealed just three of 71 hotels used complied with Australia’s safety standards.

“Sixty-eight buildings failed,” Rob Llewellyn, from the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council, said. “They included from pumps, where the batteries were flat and would never start, diesel tanks that had no diesel ... contractors punching holes through fire walls without the necessary collars or seals.

“I could go on and on and on.”

Earlier, the Building Products Innovation Council executive officer, Rodger Hills, gave evidence that the use of fraudulent documents to certify unsafe building products was rife.

Hills said one of his members, the Australian Windows Association, had thousands of pages of evidence of fraud in the industry. He said he had provided repeated warnings of the scale of fraud to state and federal governments, without any real response.

“Fraudulent documentation is a massive problem in the industry,” he said. “Since at least when I started with the building products innovation council, which was three years ago or so, but even before that, I’ve been saying it’s a massive issue.”

Hills said he was not aware of a single prosecution involving fraudulent building certification in Australia. Subsequent witnesses said they were similarly unaware of any prosecution having ever taken place.

The inquiry heard such fraud was outside the jurisdiction of both police and the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission. A simple change to include building products in the definition “consumer good” would put such fraud in the ACCC’s remit, the inquiry heard.

“If someone comes across a fraudulent document, who do they report it to?” Hill said. “The police will turn around and say, ‘Well, that’s not our jurisdiction’.

“If they take it to the ACCC, they say ‘it’s not our jurisdiction’.”

“So at the moment there’s nowhere to report these instances because simply there’s nothing there.”

The shadow industry minister, Kim Carr, told Guardian Australia reforms were needed as a matter of urgency.

Carr, who sits on the Senate inquiry, said the government response was marred by buck-passing and blame-shifting.

He said privatisation and deregulation had left the industry ripe for fraud and unsafe practices.

“There is evidence of a litany of failures, where every level of government points to someone else being responsible,” Carr said.

The Owners Corporation Network’s chairman, Stephen Goddard, made a powerful plea to the committee for action, warning that 75% of new buildings were being constructed with defects.

“You have seen in the Lacrosse building how it can happen here and to what extent,” he said. “You have seen in the United Kingdom the level of loss of life you are facing.

“Your failure to act has dire consequence. The act we ask you to take is to cause the building sector to become truly accountable, not regulated in the way that we’ve seen regulation fail to deliver life safety for the whole of this century so far.”

Goddard said consumer protections and home warranty insurance had been “whittled away” as governments sought to encourage building companies to build.



His group wants to see the creation of a statutory duty of care extending from builders to end users.



That would seek to overcome a 2014 high court decision, involving builder Multiplex and an owners corporation, which found the company owed no duty of care to owners.



“If this situation is to be remediated, it falls upon the parliaments of this commonwealth to create a statutory duty of care,” Goddard said. “The solution that the Owners Corporation Network would put before you is to consider a statutory duty of care extended to the end user, the victim.

“The person who buys into a strata building, unable to see the invisible absence of fire dampeners, the absence of fire collars and now the existence of flammable cladding.”



The inquiry continues.

