Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Four young men dead, 105 house fires, 1,000 electrified roofs and probably many thousand more, 240,000 dangerous or substandard insulations, up to 30,000 lost jobs, hundreds of small businesses heading for liquidation, three companies so far charged with fraud and hundreds more to come, at least 21 explicit warnings of danger ignored, a $450 million bill to fix up the mess, and estimations of compensation claims perhaps as high as $1 billion—that is the tragic tally of personal, environmental and economic disasters created by just one of the Rudd Labor government’s programs. And the government expect the Australian people to give them a second term, to give them more opportunities to administer programs in this kind of shoddy way! They expect us to give them more opportunities to affect the lives of thousands of Australians in an adverse way.

They criticise us for obstructing their legislative program. They expect us to support their other grand plans, like the uncosted National Broadband Network—what a debacle that is! Before the election it was going to provide, for $4.7 billion, a high-speed broadband fibre-to-the-node system to 98 per cent of Australia. The first connections were going to be made by Christmas 2008. Now it is only 90 per cent of Australians who are to be served. Two million people have been excluded, mostly in regional areas, including every town under 1,000 people, and the cost is $43 billion. What is more, nobody wants to build it. There is no plan. All they have got is a plan to belt up Telstra to a pulp.

The reality is that this government has failed. It cannot administer programs. It has failed to deliver, and Australians are suffering from its incompetence. I do not think I have ever in my life seen a program more poorly managed or so disastrously administered as Labor’s Home Insulation Program. Yet not one person has actually lost their job over this appalling debacle. The Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts is still drawing the same wage. So is the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Government Service Delivery. So is the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. So is the Prime Minister. The minister for the environment has been asked to take the rap. This ‘first-class minister’ has been hit with a supercharged feather, but all he is doing is playing in a smaller chook pen. The reality is that he has had to take the blame, and he must be looking with angry eyes at the ministers sitting alongside him who are getting off scot-free. The blame certainly lies higher up, amongst ministers who were part of this so-called project control group that had responsibility for the devising of the program early in the piece.

In question time on 24 February, when asked about the government’s insulation program, the Prime Minister acknowledged that ‘in the early part of 2009 an initial risk assessment was done for the cabinet’. So cabinet was told to have a risk assessment done—according to the words of the Prime Minister—by February 2009. There was an additional assessment in April—the Minter Ellison report, which has been ignored. In fact, the minister said that he did not even see it for 10 months, in spite of weekly reports from his department on the progress.

The project control group should have been well and truly aware that they were acting with a program which had considerable dangers. In fact, on 24 February in this House, the Prime Minister said, in commenting on the insulation program:

I also draw the honourable member’s attention to the fact that in 2008, against an industry that at that stage was rolling out something in the vicinity of 50,000 to 75,000 retrofitted insulations each year, the number of fires was, I am advised, something in the order of 83.

The Prime Minister was talking about 83 fires in the insulation programs; yet here he was ramping up a program 10 times bigger—100-fold—and no measures were taken to ensure that there would not be 100 times more fires as a result of the program they were implementing. The government are culpable in this area. They were warned. They knew that there were serious issues associated with the development of a program of this nature, but the Prime Minister and other senior ministers took no action to intervene. Now there is a tally of death and destruction which is plain for us all to see.

It is also a major disappointment that there has been such a trashing of confidence in the roof insulation industry—a legitimate trade which has effectively been ruined. Stefanie Balogh, commenting in the Courier-Mail, wrote:

The Rudd Government’s $2.45 billion home insulation program ended up turning into a magnet for every cowboy in town.

It was certainly a magnet for rorts. Let us look at a few of the rorts that have so far been identified—and there are undoubtedly many more. There were really no quotes below $1,600 ever given, even though the average cost for roof insulation was only $1,200. The government woke up to that months and months later and reduced the amount of the rebate. But, again, there was never going to be a quote below that number because the government were prepared to give out $1,600 without even asking any questions.

The government have clearly paid scores of claims—maybe hundreds—for jobs that were never done, for households that do not even exist. Two quotes were required but often they came from the same company. There was quote collusion between companies to share the jobs between them. Quotes were made by using Google Earth. People did not even bother to inspect the houses; they just found the house on Google Earth and then sent a quote in the mail. They used substandard insulation—batts cut in two. Companies were passing themselves off to householders as being government agencies. Fly-by-night installers were leaving botched or difficult jobs incomplete. No-one took any action to intervene. And the companies responsible for dodgy insulation are now being told that they can inspect their own work and repair it.

The opposition brought to the attention of the House in question time a couple of weeks ago the plight of the Smith family of Gympie. Mr Smith said that the installers cut rolls of fibre insulation the wrong size and left the cut rolls uninstalled in his roof cavity. He said that the installers fell through the plaster ceiling above his bedroom wardrobe, that they behaved in a threatening manner when he became upset and that they suggested that they sort it out at the pub when his wife ordered them out of the house. Two months later, the installers had not been in contact to repair the damage. The Smiths called the police, who were also called to investigate another incident, apparently involving the same people. This is the kind of behaviour that the government was subsidising through its ill-considered and inappropriately supervised program.

Electricians had been warning for ages that the use of foil insulation in homes could be dangerous. Kyle McKennon said that he always believed the use of foil insulation in homes was a disaster waiting to happen. He said:

From the moment I heard about this the alarm bells started going.

David Benjamin, from Kawanna Electrical at Buddina, said:

The whole concept of putting a conductor in a ceiling cavity is absurd.

Mr Benjamin went on to say that he had received numerous calls from people who had had foil insulation installed and were now concerned about their safety. Is it any wonder? One suggested that the minister might like to get up in the roof and put his finger on the insulation to test for himself whether or not their roof was electrified.

Stan Dennis, an electrician from Nanango with 50 years experience working in the electrical industry, said that if anyone has aluminium foil in their ceiling, they should get rid of it immediately. David Elston, an electrician from Cooroy, called my office to warn that rodents chew cables in the roofs of homes. He stated that even if there was an inspection done one day and considered okay, the next day a cable could be chewed by a rodent, making the house unsafe. An article in the Sunshine Coast Daily reported:

Charlie Gardener ... said he was angered after visiting several retirement villages where residents’ homes had been fitted with the potentially dangerous foil which he believes “doesn’t even work”.

Several months ago he wrote to the Federal Government about his concerns, but never received a report.

The government were asleep at the wheel. They were not on watch. They were not doing what they should have been doing when supervising a massive multibillion dollar program—a program which has had such disastrous consequences. The editor of the Fraser Coast Chronicle wrote in the editorial:

Before the program was introduced I got a quote to insulate my home in Grafton and it came in at $1700. After the rebate scheme was announced I got new quotes. Both were more than $2200.

The rorts were happening every day and the government were doing nothing about it.

Now, of course, the government have set up a complaints inquiry line. You can ring a number to get some assistance. Caulfield man David Wise, 78, was reported in the Herald Sun as saying that when he rang the government hotline yesterday he was told it could take five years to get his insulation checked. And today the minister made some similar comments this morning when he said that he had no idea at all how long it was going to actually take to inspect all of these roofs and all of these insulations.

The government has now passed this program on to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. I do not think that department has the kind of record that would give you any confidence it was going to be able to fix the mess. Today, the parliament has given the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency another $20 million for office space. Some of that is going to be taken over by the people who are supposed to fix this bungled program, but it is also going to house 150 bureaucrats who have been employed to administer the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. What Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme? It is not there, yet 150 bureaucrats are moving into $20 million worth of new office space so they can administer the program. The Treasurer acknowledged on 4BC in Brisbane that the legislation was not going to pass. We have had other ministers going around the press gallery saying that the CPRS is dead.

The public servant who heads the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency really belled the cat. The Canberra Times reported that he was blunt when talking to the staff on hearing the news that he was to administer this program and said that the public servants responsible for dealing with this insulation debacle have been through hell. He said:

You have not had ... the resources that you needed to do the job and even if you had, there are inherent policy design flaws ...

He said that he did not feel he could do much better and said:

It’s not like the DCC has any expertise in this area. DCC is not a program manager ...

The government have now handed the responsibility for fixing the mess to a department that says straight out: ‘We’ve got no expertise in this area. We know nothing about it.’ This has been a bungled program from beginning to end. Mr Garrett has taken some of the heat but the reality is that the whole government are culpable for incompetent administration and they are showing no signs yet that they are actually going to do anything to fix things.

But that is not the end of this government’s inabilities. A government which could not give away home insulation during a heatwave is now asking us to trust them to run the hospitals. The New South Wales Labor government have already produced a list of 117 district hospitals, community surgeries, psychiatric facilities, multipurpose hospitals and nursing homes that they believe will close as a result of the Rudd Labor government’s new hospitals program. New South Wales have named their hospitals that are on Labor’s closure list. Why don’t Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory do exactly the same? We need to know who is on the hit list. Which hospitals are going to take the hit because of Labor’s proposed new arrangements?

Labor’s health plan will not produce one extra dollar for health. Simply rebadging some of the states’ GST money and calling it federal money does not make the amount of money available for hospitals any greater. And they are going to set up an extra level of bureaucracy. What hospital services are going to be cut? We were told yesterday that the Prime Minister is going to reward hospitals that produce good results. Where is that money coming from? What services are going to be cut to enable those rewards to be paid?

No-one should ever have any confidence in a health scheme administered by this Prime Minister. When he was running Queensland, to use his own words, as chief adviser to the Goss Labor government, he abolished local hospital boards—the very boards he is now proposing to build. He also closed hundreds of hospital beds across the state. He has form. He has a record in managing hospitals and it is a disastrous record. He began the demise of the great Queensland health system and he should not be trusted with the national health system. (Time expired)

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