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

Today's Courier-Mail, in a major article headlined 'Time to stop the waste', deals with some of the bungles, blunders and wipe-outs of this government. Featured prominently is a discussion of the disastrous Home Insulation Program which has defrauded thousands of Australians. There have been examples of fraudulent operators, substandard products, unsafe work practices and gross mismanagement. Like all members, I have received many complaints about this scheme, and I want to refer to just a couple of them tonight. I believe that the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mr Dreyfus, is genuinely trying to resolve as many of these issues as he can, and $100 million more was provided to assist him in that process. But that will go nowhere near fixing the cases of heartbreak, mismanagement and fraud that have been a feature of this program.

On the Sunshine Coast there were 25 home insulation businesses before this program began. The number grew to 250 during that period and unfortunately in the process the program destroyed the reputations of honest, hardworking local businesses because so many out-of-towners, fly-in fly-outs and people phoning from interstate and canvassing door to door have left a trail of destruction and damage across the countryside—broken roofs, insulation just chucked in the ceiling and never properly installed, holes in the ceiling. The government has been unwilling to find ways to resolve so many of these issues.

PricewaterhouseCoopers identified 150 claims where there was no insulation installed. In fact, in reality the total number will be much higher than that. I had a former constituent who bought a house in another city and several months later inspectors arrived to look at the insulation in his roof. There had never been any insulation installed in his home. There were 2,444 cases identified where more than one installer claimed for the same house. I have an installer in my electorate who was one of the victims of this scam. He installed the insulation, doing it properly, he believes, but another person had already claimed for installing insulation in that particular house.

The Auditor-General identified 347,789 payments that were higher than the amount that it had actually cost to put insulation into the particular homes. Let me mention just a couple of these from my own electorate. I had a constituent who had foil installed in his home in August 2009 and removed in October 2010, just a few months later. At the time of the foil installation he was required to pay $1,700 in addition to the subsidy from the government. It all had to be taken out because it was dangerous. The government paid the cost of taking it out, but this man was left without $1,700, which he had to pay in addition to what the installer had received—and there is no compensation for that amount of money. Another case concerns constituents was persuaded by a representative of a company to have triple-layer foil insulation installed. On that company's advice they had triple-layer insulation put in. It cost an extra $1,019 on top of what the government subsidy would provide. However, once this product was installed the constituent found that the temperature in the house was 1½ degrees hotter than if one had been standing outside. So the constituent had it pulled out, but now they have got to meet the full cost even though the department has told them that this product never ever met the required rating—another very unhappy customer.

I refer also to the Green Loans assessor program and a case brought to my attention only a few days ago. One of my local Green Loans assessors went to all the expense of training. He did only 83 assessments and earned less than $16,000. But now he finds that, under the terms of the program, he has to maintain an insurance premium of $4,900 a year for seven years to cover the work that he undertook. Even though he did only $16,000 worth of business—and most of that was used up in training, advertising, registration and start-up costs—he is going to pay $34,300 over the next seven years on insurance policies on just 83 jobs.

I have drawn most of these matters to the attention of the parliamentary secretary and he has been unable to fix them. I think he is trying, but the government must devote resources to fix these completely unconscionable outcomes which are a direct result of the mismanagement of this program. (Time expired)