The house, on the corner of Coranderrk and Elimatta streets, was added to the ACT government's affected properties register on August 18, a day after a new voluntary buyback scheme came into force in the ACT.

The head of the ACT government's asbestos response taskforce, Lea Durie, said the taskforce was informed the house had been found to contain loose-fill asbestos insulation on August 12 and worked quickly to add it to the register, but the commencement of the new scheme was not a factor.

The house was sold for $1.8 million at auction earlier this year.

Ms Durie said all the houses discovered to be affected by Mr Fluffy insulation in the last seven years were identified during renovations when tradespeople identified loose-fill asbestos, which meant there could still be undisturbed Mr Fluffy houses in the ACT.

"It's not that we're expecting further properties, it's more so that we just acknowledge that there's a likelihood there could be further properties out there and that's why the ongoing scheme was set up, so that we can capture and provide an equitable outcome for owners of properties that might be discovered in the future," Ms Lea said.

"There may be none, there may be a handful. It's hard to know."

Additional houses were identified in December 2016, July and November 2019, and February and March 2020, as well as in August. The owners of all six houses have elected to participate in the government's buyback program, a spokesman for the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate said.

The taskforce will be wound up on June 30, 2022, more than seven years after then chief minister Katy Gallagher declared the more than 1000 affected homes should be demolished within five years as part of a $1 billion buyback and demolition scheme.

However, there are still 35 affected blocks yet to be cleared, with less than half of those acquired by the ACT government. The ACT government has said it would consider forced acquisitions from mid-2025.

The opposition building spokesman, Mark Parton, said the discovery of more Mr Fluffy houses had shown the government had not taken its duty of care obligations seriously.

"Despite a huge effort to examine 65,000 properties, and a billion dollars' expenditure to detect and eradicate this insidious problem, we are still finding contaminated properties. We don't know how many are out there and we could have a ticking time bomb on our hands," Mr Parton said.

Mr Parton said the decision of Building and Sustainable Construction Minister Rebecca Vassarotti to reject a 2014 recommendation to make asbestos assessments mandatory on the sale of pre-1980 houses meant the government was "perpetrating more potential tragedies".

Ms Vassarotti said in a statement the government reviewed the recommendations before signing off on the new scheme. "The ACT government considered that the current provisions, including mandatory asbestos awareness training for tradespeople, had been effective in identifying the relatively small number of homes that have been detected since the scheme commenced," Ms Vassarotti said.

MORE A.C.T. POLITICS NEWS:

About 1000 houses in the ACT were insulated with loose-fill asbestos - one of the most dangerous forms of the fibre - in the late 1960s and 1970s by a company trading as Mr Fluffy.

Amosite asbestos is considered to be one of the two most dangerous forms of the substance, because it is easily crumbled or reduced to powder. The microscopic amosite fibres require very little disturbance to become airborne.

A government-funded loose asbestos insulation removal program was conducted from 1988 to 1993 to remove the substance from houses. This followed a survey of all ACT homes built before 1980 to determine whether this insulation had been used.

Since 2004, residential sales in the territory must include a lease conveyance report advising buyers whether the house contained loose-fill asbestos.

However, the ACT government moved to demolish the homes after it was revealed in 2013 owners had been exposed to the dangerous asbestos during renovation work, despite first brushing off calls to demolish the properties.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: