Ms Challenger was one of 12 owners who appeared on Monday at an Assembly inquiry into the $1 billion Fluffy buyback, many of them pointing to the treatment of owners who had demolished their homes privately before the buyback announcement on October 28. Those owners are being allowed to keep their land, plus being paid the cost of their demolitions and the market price of their homes.

Ms Challenger said she and her husband had made an offer on a new home in January, before the February letter that sparked the crisis. They were locked into the purchase so had to sell the Fluffy home in Wanniassa, but with the unfolding crisis were forced to sell at a loss. They sold for $403,000, up to $80,000 less than if it hadn't been sold as a Fluffy home.

The family were now struggling with a bigger mortgage than they could afford on their new home, relying on her mother, who was a pensioner, to help them make repayments. She woke with a sense of dread and went to bed with a sense of dread about their financial situation, and did not dare think about health implications.

For people who sold Mr Fluffy homes after February, the government is paying the new owners the amount they paid for the home rather than market value. The sellers are not being compensated.

"We're victims of this disaster too," she said. "... We do not deserve to be ignored or forgotten."

Fluffy owner Kim Grant said it was a fallacy that owners could use the buyback money to buy an equivalent home, with keen competition for the few homes on the market.

Accusing the government of incompetent handling of the crisis, she said the issue could not be defined in monetary terms.

Ms Grant, a mosaic artist, has been working on a mosaic installation on the outside of her house since 2007, with the last piece installed recently for her father who died last year. The tile work, which had taken many hundreds of hours, would be demolished with the house, a priceless loss.

Ms Grant said of 10 samples from her house this year, just one had tested positive for asbestos – from the top shelf of her boys' cupboard. She struggled with the idea that they might have been dressing every day in asbestos-contaminated clothes.

Another mother, Christina Pilkington, said she would dump all soft furnishings and bedding because she did not want to be sitting at her daughter's hospital bedside in 25 years and not be able to say she did everything she could to limit her family's exposure to a class 1 carcinogen. But she pointed to the confusion in the government's advice on what to do with contents. While the government said it was safe to wipe and retain hard items, she was unsure whether the television, which had vents, was safe

Mrs Pilkington urged the government to let home owners stay on their land. She produced detailed costings to show that the government would be about $34 million worse off if it allowed the 50 per cent of families who wanted to keep their land to do so, by the time it saved on security, maintenance and buying the land. Home owners forced to buy back their land later rather than being allowed to keep it would be worse off by an average $81,000 each, she said.

Home owners who wanted to return to their land should be given priority in the demolitions, even if it meant paying a fee.

Joanne Erskine said she had spent $60,000 altering her house for her disability and would struggle to find a new home in a market with very few disability friendly homes to buy or rent. She urged the government to pay her the cost of the house and demolition, which she said amounted to less than the $210,000 the government planned to spend on demolition, security and maintenance alone.

A Kambah couple said with the demolition of their home and a brother's neighbouring home, the government would make a "motza" developing the 1800 square metres and gain from their misfortune. They wanted to stay and be paid the cost of demolition and the house, which would amount to less than $300,000.

Steve Blume, the only non-Fluffy resident to make a submission,

Mr Blume, who lives next door to three Fluffy homes in a Chapman cul-de-sac, said the buyback was not fair to owners, not taking account of the cost of contents and landscaping, temporary accommodation, removal and storage costs, and other costs. Families also faced rapidly rising building costs, as they had after the 2003 bushfires.