Brisbane: Cladding on Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra hospital is combustible, the Queensland government has confirmed.
The health minister, Cameron Dick, says 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 about how fraudulent practices to certify unsafe building products were quite widespread across the country. The same inquiry heard that 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 activated 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 that 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.