Jum Wallner

Disaster.

So the late 1960s and 1970s, the Mr. Fluffy Company could loose fill fluffy insulation, the most dangerous kind, into the roofs of around 1,000 Canberra homes.

Yeah, fluff.

In the Walners' house, it was a two-day job and they left a pile of it in their garage overnight on a tarp.

Jum had three brothers and they had a snowball fight with it.

Of course they would, wouldn't you?

If you were a seven-year-old boy, Jum was three, he was the youngest, maybe he got hit with the most snowballs.

For the next 20 years, Jum's mum had to put tape L-foil to the vent in the kitchen because the little wisps of it would fall in.

into the kitchen.

So she put alfoil over it.

Went onto the bloody food.

Yeah.

No one knew how dangerous it was.

His parents were doctors.

They didn't know.

And it was around the late 80s when people started to realise how dangerous it was.

All the houses were cleaned in the late 80s, thoroughly cleaned.

But then in the 90s and 2000s, it became clear that the ACT government couldn't exactly necessarily guarantee that

Cleaned meant completely cleaned and completely safe.

By 2014, the ACT government borrowed a billion dollars to buy all the houses back from owners at market value, so to effectively compensate them because the houses weren't worth anywhere near what they would be at normal market values.