Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Then, when the building-boom slid into glut phase, as booms do, you and your partner, each working two jobs, scraped up the deposit for a million-dollar two-bedder. Suddenly you were the proud owners of a microscopic kitchen and four undistinguished rooms 10 storeys off the ground in deepest suburban Dogville. It was small, but it was heaven. Six months later you were summarily evacuated with barely enough time to collect the cat and the baby photos. Now you’re paying rent as well as a mortgage for a flat you’ll never be able to sell - and facing your share in a $5 million repair bill before you can even think of living there again. And the truly galling thing is that it was entirely foreseeable and preventable. “Finger pointing will not deal with this issue,” said Minister for Better Regulation, Kevin Anderson. But – Homebush, Mascot, Zetland, Erko, Alexandria. Inside seven months five buildings have been rendered uninhabitable by preventable problems and more than 600 in NSW identified with non-compliant combustible cladding. And it won’t stop there. So, as the scandal branches and spreads like a structural crack across Sydney’s stupidest building boom ever (and I’m aware that’s a big call), a spot of precision finger-pointing could be just the thing. For 20 years they’ve all been at it. The supply-and-demand-club - the Property Council, Urban Taskforce, developers and government - all frantically demanding more and more deregulation. And for whom? Oh, for us.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Yet, for all the government’s disdain of finger-pointing, its response so far to the dodgy buildings scandal has been to thrash around like a deranged spider-monkey on ice, pointing fingers in every direction but the true one. First, when structural cracks emptied Homebush’s Opal Tower at Christmas time, then-minister Matt Kean blamed dodgy certifiers. “I’ll throw the book at you,” he said – but, of course, there was no book to throw. Over 20 years, in a blood-curdling bonfire circled by hooded neo-liberals the book had been burned leaf by curling leaf. “Burn the red tape, burn the green tape,” they cry, as though that tape weren’t holding the entire industry together. Naturally the certifiers took offence. Then, after the certifier for the Lacrosse building that ignited in Melbourne Docklands was found primarily responsible, their insurers began to back away. What did the government do? Far from throwing the leaflet at anyone, much less protecting the public, they intervened (said the minister) to exclude indemnity for non-compliant cladding, so certifiers are covered for everything else. This achieves what? Only to perpetuate the status quo. Of course, certification should never have been privatised. Say what you like about efficiency and competition, you don’t fix a system of council certification (where you suspect some may be on the take) by substituting a system where the take is the one official source of income.

Loading But there are myriad other causes too. There’s sloppy-to-non-existent planning (building deep concrete basements into the shifting and waterlogged quaternary sands of the south-Sydney watershed, for example). There’s lax materials import control, for which the federal government should be entirely responsible. There are inadequate and outdated Australian Standards and building code regimes, diminished liability and unlicensed building professionals (most astonishingly engineers). Ditto. The depth and breadth of these concatenated errors is scary – not least because, as developers are belatedly realising, the market is a shaky edifice built entirely on public trust. At the heart of it all, though, is a single clear cause, government refusal to govern. That’s where all fingers should point, yet they’ve pointed everywhere but. Get many more coffins ready.