Trial by Cladding

This Must Be The Place Podcast

This episode of This Must Be The Place is a bit different – normally I talk to people, but in this episode I (meaning Liz Taylor, Monash University) actually just read out an essay I wrote recently about my experience of living in a building with combustible cladding. Also about reading Kafka (and Graeber) and…well that’s the basic premise. I’ve called it Trial by Cladding. “I recently finished reading Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel “The Trial”: the unsettling, absurd story of a young middle-class man suddenly caught up in a farce of bureaucracy. The protagonist Joseph K spends a year fighting charges which are never named, but of which he is presumed guilty. He is increasingly consumed by obscure court proceedings which, officious lawyers assure him, are very serious, but that he need not dare try to understand. Disbelief ebbs into resignation. Weekends disappear with worry, and inconvenient appointments see him start to slip up at his job at the bank. The fact he doesn’t know what he is accused of, or whether or not he did something wrong, becomes irrelevant even to himself. “My innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”, K reflects: “I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up”. I started reading “The Trial” after my apartment building’s last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding. Like most people I knew Kafka was shorthand for absurd situations - famously “Metamorphosis” begins with the character waking up as a giant insect. From its popular usage I understood ‘Kafkaesque’ to mean a comically complicated process – which the situation with combustible cladding certainly already was. But I think “The Trial” had also once been mentioned to me in passing by a Croatian colleague who described her suspicion of cheerful government descriptions of policies. To her, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia, these inevitably signalled something cruelly incompetent going on in the background. Like in “The Trial”, she said. In the confusing boredom of an Owners Corporation meeting concerned with the strange details of the urgent need for us to remove chunks of our building, I was drawn to finally reading “The Trial”. At the least, I thought it might provide a lighter perspective on our situation. Like tens of thousands of others in Victoria, I own and live in an apartment in a building containing combustible cladding - similar materials to what fuelled the 2017 fire at London’s Grenfell Towers, in which 72 people died. In the wake of the Grenfell fire and of a 2014 fire at the LaCrosse Building in Melbourne’s Docklands, Victoria’s Cladding Taskforce determined that the presence of combustible cladding, including aluminium composite panels, on high rise buildings is unsafe and non-compliant. Perhaps surprisingly, the onus for rectifying non-compliant cladding in Victoria has been placed with apartment owners. Not with the builders, developers and other professionals who specified and used the materials and sold the apartments; not with the insurance agencies fond of advertising how awful it would be if a random problem were to happen to your house and ‘won’t you be glad you had insurance’ when it does; nor the local and state government regulators (and private building surveyors who replaced council building inspectors from the 1990s) who signed off on the buildings. Instead, owners who bought purportedly compliant apartments are compelled to fix an urgent problem created by government and industry, and facing bills of typically $40,000 to $60,000 per apartment to do so. In most cases they are poorly equipped to navigate the financial and broader costs. But as Joseph K reflects, “innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”…[more in episode]