Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and point out to the honourable member that, as he well knows, the information that was provided by the secretary of the department on Friday pointed to two components of compliance and risk under this program, one relating to actual risks identified as being significant and the other a range of risk issues including, amongst other things, spaces between the installation of batts, uncompleted paperwork and the like. I again caution the opposition about conflating interim figures on risk assessment to make predictions about the risk levels across the landscape of the Home Insulation Program. The fact is that we have insulated over one million homes under this program, that there has been a risk and compliance strategy in place since the program ran out from 1 July and that that has been delivered as a consequence of advice that we received not only from my department but also from the industry itself, from training bodies and from consultations with stakeholders which have regularly taken place as a consequence of the delivery of this program.

The changes we announced on Friday go to the key point that the appropriate and safe management of risk under this program is a responsibility I take seriously and the measures that we have identified for both a register and a continued delivery of insulation into people’s homes through the transition to a new program is well articulated and identified. We will work closely with industry and the relevant authorities, particularly state authorities, in relation to that delivery. It will be done in a way which ensures that the delivery of insulation, a product which has been in use in Australian homes for many years and installed safely for many years, can continue.

See this speech in context