Too often it takes a crisis to trigger changes in legislation and behaviour, when forward thinking, cooperation and future planning could have negated the risk in the first place. Australia’s building and construction industry is under the microscope and changes in the law are in the wind, due to situations that could have been avoided. These include the evacuation of Sydney’s Opal building and the fires in Melbourne’s Lacrosse tower in 2014 and the Neo200 apartment building in February, both of which were fuelled by combustable cladding, as was the 2017 fire in London’s Grenfell Tower that killed 72 people.