Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

In debates like these, where both arguments appear to be running in parallel, it is important to remember exactly why we come here, and that is to spend taxpayers' money effectively. Where government has made a very significant concession that this money was not expended effectively, I think, as a government, we want to do everything possible to (a) ensure it does not happen again and (b) actually identify where the money was very poorly spent and take action where people abused the program.

At the moment the case has been made by the member for Chifley that it is both inane and vexatious to further question this program simply because a motion has previously been voted down on this matter. With the greatest respect, the motion pertained to the very efforts that this government has made to examine and remediate the damage done by this program. With the greatest respect to those efforts, they still only comprise between five and 10 per cent of the dwellings that have been insulated. As anyone would know in any community around Australia, in many cases this program was manipulated, if not fraudulently abused, by operators around the country where they had an opportunity to do so.

I think the great blockage here is: the further you dig, the worse it gets—and that is why this government wants to skim over this as quickly as possible. Never forget that there are people in Australia who right now have suffered damage, as the previous speaker, the member for Bradfield, has pointed out, to their homes that has not been repaired. There are people who have had foil insulation ripped out and not replaced, so not only have they had the inconvenience of having the foil placed in their homes and then removed but there was nothing in this program to actually insulate the home as we promised we would do as a government. So they are left without insulation completely, which may not bother the government greatly but it does bother both my and the Deputy Speaker's constituents, who live in subtropical environments and would like to have accrued some benefit from this $3.2 billion program.

Of course, let's remember why we embarked on this in the first place: it was to reduce carbon emissions. Ultimately, it was about abatement, wasn't it, even though we have long forgotten that now. This was about abating 12 to 13.1 megatonnes of carbon and it came at a price between $50 and $90 per tonne abated, which in any recent economics makes it an absolutely unsupportable program had we looked at it purely in economic terms. You are really left with the ultimate effort then, which was how to quickly disburse money to act against the global financial crisis. The former Prime Minister will be remembered for more than any other achievement, bar probably his apology to Indigenous Australians, for the insulation program—not only the diabolical mess that it was but the diabolical efforts that have been made to clean it up. It is not enough for the member for Chifley to simply say, 'We've carried out 35 search warrants. Surely, we're getting to the bottom of it now.' The reality is that ordinary Australians, just like the opposition, know the further you dig the more you find; and the more you find the more there is an opportunity to ameliorate and fix the mess but the more embarrassing it is for the government. We do not do this because we have nothing better to do in this place than embarrass the government; we do it because Australians have been ripped off and because money has been sequestered for no good reason other than on the pretext of having signed off on a poorly designed program.

It raises this issue once again: do we expect too much of our federal departments? The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency is a very small department. It is not well-resourced but we ask of it to do a job of Centrelink proportions to be able to run a program like this. It shows a certain overambition around federal government programs and we hope this current administration has learnt from its own predecessor: there are some jobs that are just too complex and require too great an intervention to be done effectively by a small department. Whether you measure it in abatement—in what we got for the dollars—in the tragic house fires or in the efforts to remediate it, we have now expended most of the money in this program trying to fix up the mess it created and we are still only 10 per cent of the way there. To set a bar of 150,000 households is to presume that the other two-point-something million do not have a problem. Surely the result of an investigation should be: where we find fault, let's continue to investigate it. If it had found no problems after auditing 150,000 households we would understand that a government might stop, but this has simply dug up more and more disaster. Whether it is phantom insulation or trespass insulation, whether it is double insulation or whatever, this government has an obligation to fix up its mess. It is quite okay to talk about a million dollars here or there from your predecessors on this side of the House when in government, but the enormous multibillion dollar waste is something that will be remembered—no, inscribed as an epitaph on the tombstone of this government when it finally falls—along with the massive inefficiency and the massive misunderstanding of how to spend taxpayers' money effectively.

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