In one sense, Kim Grant has put her Fluffy nightmare behind her, buying a new home and moving out with her three children in May. In another sense, she has been left angry and devastated by the treatment of Fluffy owners, who she says were misled for years and have now been forced into unfair buyback of their homes.
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Ms Grant is a mosaic artist and is fighting the loss of tiling from her Spence home. She tiled an entire wall of the house, including a section finished for her father on the anniversary of his death just before the buyback announcement last year. The mosaic, showing poppies and a wartime photo of her father, is now in pieces after she tried unsuccessfully to chip the ungrouted tiles from the wall. She has other sections she wants to save – one based on childhood drawings by her daughter and another on drawings she did while her father was ill in hospital – and has advice from an asbestos assessor they can be removed safely with the brickwork during demolition, but the Asbestos Taskforce is refusing to allow the salvage.
Ms Grant says the advice is contradictory. She lived in the house for 13 years, including getting an owner-builder's licence with her partner and doing major renovations, pulling up floorboards and demolishing internal walls, while her two boys were little and she was pregnant with her daughter. If the health risk is as low as she is now being told, how can it not be safe to clean and remove a section of brickwork, she asks.
"If it's safe enough for them to demolish, and put into a dump truck and bring all the way across Canberra to a dump site then it should be safe enough for me to be able to cut out a section and use it as a small brick wall in my garden or in a patio," she says.
A taskforce spokeswoman said it had sought advice from industry and experts in concluding it wasn't safe to remove whole bricks but had offered to help Ms Grant to chip off tiles.
Ms Grant has replanted the entire garden from Spence in her new home, and is happy there.
"It's a relief," she says. "It's a little bittersweet. I'm lucky that I've managed to find a house that I like, and the kids have settled in great, which is fantastic. That's more than half of it right there."
She believes the government has made the right decision to demolish, but is angry at years of mistakes – allowing the installation of material known to be dangerous, the failed clean-up, and the failure to warn homeowners and buyers since. Not once was she warned by planning officials during approvals for their renovation, she says, and she is left distrustful of the buyback.
Ms Grant was not happy with the offer on her house, but says as with the rest of the scheme, owners had been given no choice. As a single mother she could not afford to buy back her land, and did not want to live in limbo for years until it was available. She lost her home-based mosaic tiling business last year when customers were reluctant to visit the home.
"The situation has caused so much chaos in my life that I really just wanted to have nothing left to do with the government," she says, with this week's decision by the NSW government to allow Fluffy owners to keep their land coming like a smack in the face.
"Think about what it's like to be told that your house is deadly, that you have exposed a whole variety of people you love to it, that your children's lives could be shortened because of that exposure, that every cent you put into the biggest asset you own is now worthless and that not only have you lost your home but a large portion of its contents, your neighbours, your community," she says.
"I keep saying it, they could have arrived at the same outcome in a very different manner."
People seeking information from the Asbestos Response Taskforce can use these contacts
Phone: 13 22 81
Email: asbestostaskforce@act.gov.au
Twitter: @TaskforceACT
People who are anxious or concerned can access support through their GP, ACT Medicare Local on 6287 8066, Lifeline (13 11 14) and Beyond Blue (1300 224 636)
