Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in relation to the Minter Ellison risk assessment. I share with my colleagues the concerns that were only exacerbated by the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts References Committee hearing this morning into the Home Insulation Program. We have confirmed, as my colleagues have indicated, that Minister Garrett’s department commissioned a risk assessment from Minter Ellison that was delivered to Minister Garrett’s department in April last year. And yet we are led to believe that the minister did not see that risk assessment in full until as recently as 11 days ago.

Through the committee process today we discovered that the risk assessment that has been made public is some 20 pages in length, some 10 months late, and bereft of a date. It did not have a covering letter; it came without a date. We had to question the department this morning to work out when the department received it and what went with it. And, yes, we learnt today that what went with it was not a covering letter—presumably there was a bill from Minter Ellison at quite some cost to the taxpayer—but a ‘risk register’. The 20-page risk assessment document itself was tabled late on Friday afternoon. Of course, that was 10 months too late and, conveniently, contemporaneous with the announcement that Minister Garrett’s so-called successful program was so successful that he was shutting it down. But at that time we were not told that the risk assessment was accompanied by a risk register. So when we asked the department this morning where the rest of the 20-page document was, we finally got told, ‘Oh, yes, there’s a risk register that goes with it.’ There was a risk register that went with it to the department back in April last year. ‘But,’ said the department, ‘it’s a live document.’ It, together with the Minter Ellison risk assessment and the risk register, were ‘embedded’—in the words of Mr Forbes of the department—in the department’s processes for managing the risks and managing the Home Insulation Program, as if embedding it somehow puts to bed the concerns about the very risks identified in this report. The department’s secretary, Ms Kruk, reassured the committee, ‘Why would you expect a minister to see a risk assessment when we, as his department, take the risk assessment into account and when we, as his department, as indicated by my colleague, Mr Forbes, embedded those concerns and dealt with them along the way?’ It is as if embedding them puts them to bed and they no longer need to be worried about it.

I ask why Minister Garrett told ABC News radio today:

I only sought that full report—

I am not sure still what the minister meant by ‘full’—

when we were asked about it—

presumably by the opposition—

and it was provided to my office very recently.

He then went on to say:

That is correct. I only saw the full Minter Ellison report and read it in its totality last week.

How can the minister expect Australians to have confidence in his ability to deliver a Home Insulation Program—HIP—which is becoming decidedly un-hip with each and every day? How can the Australian people have confidence in his ability to deliver the HIP when he said what he did on ABC News radio this morning? He said:

Any government department that is embarking on the delivery of a new program will go through a risk assessment process. That is standard practice, and as it should be. On the basis of that work they will provide advice to the minister et cetera.

Why on earth didn’t Minister Garrett ask for a copy of that advice? Why on earth didn’t he ask how it was progressing and if he could see it? And why on earth didn’t he want to see or ask to see the risk register that went with the risk assessment?

I might venture to suggest a reason why, and that would be that the document provided by the department this afternoon, following this morning’s hearing, includes not only the recommendations that were not heeded, as referred to by my colleague Senator Birmingham, but also an extra column entitled ‘Inherent risk quantification’. And do you know what is in that column? The bucks—the cost of what happens if the inherent risk is not addressed. The bucks are quantified. The buck needs to stop with the government and the buck needs to stop with the minister. Bearing in mind these figures were speculation back in April last year, if you go through and add up the figures of inherent risk qualification in the risk register provided by Minter Ellison, you get a grand total of costs, on my reading—I would love to be proven wrong—of anything from $245 million up to $835 million. This is the cost of failing to address the risks inherent in Minter Ellison risk assessment.

Those risks included, for example and most significantly, administrative costs occasioned by, for example, delays in delivery—we have had those; nondelivery—we have heard the stories about that; fraud—I think we have heard about a bit of that; and loss of industry support for the program—well, unfortunately that must be so from an industry largely full of reputable players who find the industry and their image so tarnished by this so-called hip but decidedly un-hip program. So, all of those inherent risks are quantified by the Minter Ellison risk register and for all of those inherent risks quantified by the Minter Ellison risk register—administrative costs, delays in delivery, nondelivery, fraud and loss of industry support for the program—we have $500,000 in administrative costs. If you add up the underside, the cheapest administrative costs up to the most expensive costs of not addressing the risks inherent, as referred to by Minter Ellison, you get costs ranging from $245 million on my calculation to some $835 million. That is as of April last year—the best guesstimate of Minter Ellison, according to what we have, as of April last year.

What has happened since then? I think things have got worse, not better. It is not unreasonable to speculate that, if the upper end of that cost were to, say, double from some $835 million, all of a sudden you have $1.7 billion. And what was supposed to be the outlay of this program in the beginning? It was $2.7 billion. That is not much off par—and this is for a program which was set up not only to create jobs, many of which were lost as of Friday last week, but also to stimulate the economy. So a program that was supposed to inject money into the economy could very quickly be backing money right out of it, on the say-so of the very firm commissioned by Minister Garrett’s own department to warn of the risks inherent in the program and the costs of failing to address those risks. Rather than injecting money into the economy, this program risks backing money out of the economy. Minister Garrett and Prime Minister Rudd could have found that out had they bothered to ask—but they did not.

The department this morning would have had us believe that it was no big deal that the minister did not seek a copy of this report; it was really just routine. According to Secretary Kruk, effectively the risk assessment and the risk register are now out of date because they are live documents. Then why on earth bother to give them to the minister at all, and why bother to give them to him only 11 or 12 days ago, some 10 months after the jolly document came into existence in the first place? (Time expired)

Question agreed to.