Australia has won six more months of sovereign fire testing, with CSIRO agreeing to keep its North Ryde Fire Technology Laboratory in Sydney open until the end of June 2027. That is according to Simon Croft, the Housing Industry Association chief executive for industry and policy, who on Friday confirmed that the CSIRO had informed stakeholders of the lease extension.
“Now we must work with the government on the long-term solution,” Croft said, welcoming a decision he described as a small reprieve after a week in which certifiers, product suppliers, manufacturers, builders, design professionals and academics lined up against the closure.
The extension follows a public campaign in which the HIA declared that the shutdown would remove up to half of Australia’s large-scale fire-testing capacity at the worst possible time for housing delivery and National Construction Code compliance. Croft has since briefed Tim Ayres and Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Industry and Housing Ministers, as well as the Australian Building Codes Board.
Pressure has built since Wood Central exclusively revealed the closure in May, when internal documentation confirmed the decision formed part of an Infrastructure Technologies property review tied to financial constraints and organisational priorities. At the time, industry sources told Wood Central of concerns the time that the shutdown would tip Australian fire compliance testing from a duopoly into a monopoly, leaving Jensen Hughes’ NATA-accredited Melbourne laboratory as the only major commercial provider in the market.
“Fire safety gets to the core of why we have a CSIRO,” one industry source told Wood Central when the news first broke.
Croft shares that concern, cautioning that only two large-scale facilities operate nationally and that certification work risks drifting offshore to providers that may not fully interpret Australian codes and standards. His argument is not with CSIRO or the private operator, he said, but with the loss of sovereign, independent capability and collective government investment in building science, research, testing and certification.
“Delay the closure until there is a clear plan to continue this essential capability,” the Australian Institute of Building Surveyors told The Fifth Estate, having written directly to CSIRO to ask that the service continue, whether at North Ryde or another suitable location. Any service gap, the surveyors’ peak body said, would erode confidence in Australia’s building safety framework.
North Ryde has handled the bulk of retesting work after every major cladding fire in Australia, as well as the product development and large-scale assessments that followed the Black Summer bushfires. Every engineered timber product, prefabricated system and bushfire-resistant housing component must pass rigorous testing before the industry can adopt it, Croft argued, even as demand for certification climbs.
Timber’s exposure runs deepest, with compliance assessments that already take 2 years tipped to stretch to 4 or 5 without the North Ryde bench, industry sources have told Wood Central. NSW’s first mass timber social housing at Glebe cleared the NCC only through costly Performance Solutions, the pathway that depends on exactly this class of large-scale testing.
CSIRO has maintained the decision followed an extensive assessment of its long-term property strategy and organisational priorities, insisting no other Infrastructure Technologies laboratories are affected. All currently contracted projects will be honoured, the agency has said, and a formal feedback form remains open for written submissions on dependencies, potential impacts and considerations.
