For obvious reasons, our podcast this week is about the Mascot Tower crisis. We recorded the podcast before we were aware of the story in today's Financial Review revealing that the developer and builder of the property next door, as well as the local council, were already facing legal action because of disturbance caused by the construction of another residential tower in the adjoining lot.Anyway, our podcast explores a number of other issues, including what we can do to prevent this from happening again, and what we should do when it inevitably does.You can listen to the podcast just by clicking the play button. And if you prefer to read, a lightly edited transcript of the podcast is further down the page. Enjoy!If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it’s completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher). And please leave us a rating … especially if you like the podcasts.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-Wrap-28-Mascot.mp3PODCAST #28 - A TranscriptJIMMY: Cracks appear in another apartment block in Sydney and residents are evacuated at the last minute. What can we do to stop a crisis turning into a catastrophe? I'm Jimmy Thomson. I write the flat chat column in the Fin Review and edit the Flat Chat website ..SUE: And I'm Sue Williams, journalist and author.JIMMY: And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.MUSICJIMMY: Okay, Sue. We just had another example of of cracks appearing in a building. People turfed out onto the street, not able to take their belongings or their their pets or whatever. What do we do? What's happening? What's going on?SUE: It's horrendous that this could happen again, isn't it, so close to Opal Tower? It's just unthinkable, but then it makes you think that how many other blocks are there, with cracks, waiting to be discovered as well.JIMMY: Well, when you think about it, the government is saying, oh, we're going to tighten regulations, which they said they were going to do after Opal, but even if they had, even if they’d brought in their building commissioner that they're talking about, would it really have made any difference? I don't think so. This was always going to happen when it was going to happen.SUE: Right. It's very difficult to say because I guess the inquiry hasn't found out exactly what the problems are yet. They haven't discovered who is responsible? It's always hard when you've got developers using subcontractors, you know, are they actually supervising them well enough and they probably aren't. One has to think, and at a time we've got so much self certification, that seems to be a huge issue as well.JIMMY: Well, certainly at the time this was built, back in the bad old days when the developers were allowed to choose their certifier. If they knew what was good for them, the certifiers wouldn't not certify a building. We can't assume that's what happened in this case. We shouldn't assume anything really until more investigation has been done. My theory is that the combination of possibly poor building, possibly the building next door has been blamed and it's sitting over the
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.
