Sailor – in the first instance if you’re in NSW, the requirements of the Work Health & Safety Act (2011) don’t apply to the Owners Corporations (O/C) of Plans that are entirely residential (i.e. no commercial lots), that don’t incorporate any “workplaces” such as a gym or pool that’s available to non-residents, and that don’t directly employ “workers” such as a caretaker or on-site manager.
That said, the possible presence of asbestos on the Common Property is something that all O/C’s should make themselves aware of, and the process employed to achieve the desired degree of awareness ranges from a walk-through and note-taking exercise by some savvy Executive Committee Members and/or long-term residents, to some Strata Managers commissioning comprehensive (and sometimes costly) Reports; the best approach depends upon the site and whether the need is compulsory or precautionary.
Whether or not your O/C was required to commission the Report to which you refer, now that it has it your Executive Committee and Strata Manager needs to decide what if anything it now does with the information, and I guess that’s your quandary.
In order for that Report to comply fully with the requirements of WorkCover (NSW) for “workplaces”, the inspection should have been undertaken by a qualified person holding a Type A Licence, and it should have involved not only locating asbestos containing materials at your Plan, but initially identifying those by precautionary testing (e.g. friability), by assessing any risks to health based on the condition of and the potential for disturbance of those areas, and finally by recommending actions to control or further minimise the risks.
So it sounds to me like you’ve only received the first component of what’s compulsorily required, but the next step is, as you’ve indicated, to have representative samples properly collected by a suitably skilled person from those areas initially identified, and by having those mineralogically analysed by a NATA Accredited Laboratory; the one that I used was extremely helpful, and as I have relevant quals. they provided me with sample containers – their details are HERE.
Once confirmatory results are available, the information from the Report and the analyses should be included in an Asbestos Register, which contains information on the locations of the asbestos containing material, the composition and type of that at each location based on the friability tests and analytical data, the potential risk to persons’ health based on the condition of the material and the potential for its disturbance, and finally recommendations to control or further minimise risk to the health of “workers”; in other words on the basis of a standard risk-management process.
The Register needs to be kept on-site (or by your Strata Manager) and be incorporated with a Management Plan indicating how its information is to be used, such as to advise Contractors in advance on each occasion that they’re working on the site of the location/s of asbestos containing materials (i.e. site induction), where their work is done, what it was, what if any prioritised remedial actions the O/C will itself commission over time and when, and how often the document will be reviewed, which should be annually (at the AGM) or more often if the asbestos containing material has been disturbed, or remediated.