Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to comment on and to note the statement of the Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water on the Green Loans Program. This is a tragedy. It is a tragedy for the environment and the economy and it is a great human tragedy as well. It is one that should never have occurred. This was a great idea: retro-fitting Australia’s houses to be energy efficient is something that the Greens have been advocating for a long time. It was a way of creating jobs and building critical mass for the technologies involved. It was part of a transition to a low-carbon economy. It was about cutting power bills for people by making their houses more energy-efficient and therefore cutting their demand. It was all the things you would want: it was a new direction in education and training, it was the right direction for the economy and it was about saving energy and cutting people’s cost of living. It had all of those elements going for it and yet it was mismanaged in the most appalling way by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts and by Minister Garrett’s oversight of that department.

To begin with, I will comment on the complete lack of recognition in this statement of the human tragedy that has been the green loans scheme. First of all, it is a human tragedy for the assessors. We have in front of us lists of numbers. I was the first person to point out in this place that Minister Garrett had said this would be limited to between 1,000 and 2,000 assessors. I raised with the minister some months ago the fact that ABSA had pointed out, and they were warned a long time ago, that they were going to exceed that number and there were going to be a whole lot more assessors who were trained and accredited. But the government did nothing. It was denied by the department. It has been denied in estimates—it has been denied and denied. If I had the time I would go back through all the department’s answers in estimates and see who misled the Senate over that time. But I do not have time for that because I actually want to address what has gone on here.

Let me explain about this human tragedy, Madam Acting Deputy President. I have received hundreds of emails from assessors and the stories are incredibly similar. People have left good jobs in many cases to retrain as a home sustainability assessor. People trying to get back into the workforce saw this as worthwhile, purposeful work for the future in a growth industry. Companies took on additional people in order to do this work. And what was the cost to them? The costs were manyfold but on average people paid around $3,000 for training and they had to pay for insurance and accreditation. Many of these people did not have that money and some of them had to borrow money or to sell things. Some of them used their credit cards—maxed out their credit cards—in order to be able to do this. In fact, there is one story online today from someone who says:

... I left my comfortable desk job last year, set up my own business, and trained to become a government-licensed Home Sustainability Assessor.

Three months later, I still haven’t done a damn thing for the environment. I don’t even have a licence. My family is surviving on credit cards, and I am edging dangerously closer to bankruptcy every day. So how did it come to this?

That is a story I am being told by a lot of people. Today there are about 10,000 people across Australia who have outlaid money in good faith and who are now being told, ‘Sorry, that’s it. The government got it wrong, so we have transferred responsibility to another minister. We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward. We’re working out how we’re going to address this into the future.’ I can appreciate Minister Wong’s point of view: that is what she has been charged with and that is what she must do. But the community expects a few answers here. Who is going to be held responsible for the fact that many people are now in financial difficulties? Many people’s hopes are dashed. Who is actually responsible for this? The community wants accountability and I have been asking this government about accountability for the green loans scheme from day one.

The thing that goes with accountability is compensation. The Prime Minister took personal responsibility for the insulation debacle. He said, ‘Insulation companies lost money because of the government’s mismanagement and we are going to pay compensation.’ Something has to be done here too. Something has to be done for these people. We have people trained, accredited and registered as assessors. We have others trained and accredited, and others trained but not yet accredited. The government says that at the end of this process the number of assessors is going to be capped at 5,000. The point is: some of the people who are trained, accredited and registered have appalling training; some have excellent training and some who have been trained recently but are not yet accredited have excellent training. So we have a complete hotchpotch of quality in the training that is being provided to people even though they have had to pay a relatively similar amount for that training. I would like to know from the minister what she is going to do.

I would also like to alert the minister that in that department Stephen Berry led people to believe that the government, at government expense, would train people to upgrade their qualifications to certificate IV. I told the government that in estimates and have provided evidence of that to the government. Therefore, I want to know from the government: is it going to pay to allow those assessors who want to stay in the business to upgrade their qualifications, so they have a good level of training, at government expense? And, given that they were misled about the nature of the scheme, is there going to be compensation for people who decide they are not going to proceed with trying to get accreditation or registration? One issue that the government has not mentioned here is compensation—it clearly needs to be looked at and paid. It is a question of fairness.

The other human tragedy is the consumers. People in good faith had booked a home sustainability assessment. In some cases, people turned up at the door and said: ‘I am not even going to bother to come inside. I don’t need to come inside. Tick and flick—have you got this, have you got that? Tick the box—okay, here’s your assessment money from the government and off I go.’ So there were sharks and cowboys all over the place in this program. Other people spent two or three hours going right through the house, explaining to people what was going on and how they could be helped, and so on and so forth. But, when these reports came back from the government to those 84,000 or so consumers who received one, the reports will be of incredibly uneven value because of the way in which they were done.

Another matter which the minister did not mention but which I wanted to look at was that RMIT worked on the tool that underpinned the software for this program. That tool was changed at various times through the program so that what was emphasised as being important changed in how the reports came out, in many cases making fools of the assessors who had said to the householder, ‘Well, the best value for money would be X and the report coming out says no, it would be Y.’ That issue of the usefulness or otherwise of the tool is important.

The quality of these assessments for the householder is even more critical now because, since they are not going to get a green loan, they are probably going to be thinking that on this list of things that probably could be done there is something they might save up to do. If the report is wrong, worthless or skewed in the wrong direction, then they are going to be working in their home for something that is not going to deliver them energy efficiency benefits. There needs to be an audit which goes back and looks at what the house was, what the report was and the accuracy of that report and the weighting of this tool. For example, air leaks in houses should be one of the basic things that should be done, yet in some of these reports that is not weighted as a basic thing that you would do for energy efficiency.

Let me go to the part played by the banks. Now that there are no loans, people are going to finally be very angry—because there are only 84,000 reports out there at the moment. So, out of 210,864 people who have had their assessments done, 126,864 households are not now able to apply for a green loan. They cannot apply for one without the report and even if the report comes it is too late—the banks are not offering. Why aren’t they? The government was meant to have a contractual arrangement with financial institutions. The government says the loans are meant to be available until 22 March, so how can they just all pull out of it and say they are not offering these any more?

We have heard reports of people who got the $10,000 and offset their mortgage with it. They have not spent it on any of the technology that they supposedly got the loans for because the banks do not care. As long as the government pays the interest subsidy on the loan, the banks are not going to go out to check whether the householder has actually bought anything with it or whether they are just using it as an offset on their mortgage. All kinds of problems are associated with this.

On the human level for the assessors, whilst it might sound reasonable for the government to cap the number of assessments to five per week, it has now condemned people in this program to a very small amount of part-time work. So a lot of assessors who went into this thinking it would be a full-time career now will have to abandon it altogether because they will get only two days work when they want full-time work. We are going to lose a lot of the good, well-trained assessors from the program because the government has now declared it to be simply a part-time program. The other thing that the government did not address in this statement is how five companies got to have special arrangements with the government when individual self-employed assessors and small business did not. How did that happen? We still have not heard why Fieldforce had a special arrangement with the government whereby they could bypass the booking system. The minister did not talk about why the government failed to deliver the online booking service that was promised and why we continue to end up with the call centre and the chaos that has gone on with the call centre ever since.

There are so many issues here that really need to be looked at. Frankly, this has been very badly designed. It is not like a lot of other programs where if one thing goes wrong there is a domino effect and the whole thing falls over. This was flawed in its design and flawed in its implementation. Every aspect of the design was wrong. For example, an audit program was built into the pilot phase of the Green Loans Program. It was never implemented. There was no audit function in this program. Who is responsible for that? Is it the minister? Is it the department? Is it the secretary? Apparently, it is nobody now because we are looking to the future; we are not looking to the past. The fact that there are people around Australia who have been ruined financially because they took the government at its word does not seem to matter now because we are moving forward; we are not looking back. The Greens are looking back and forward at the same time. I wrote a letter to the Auditor-General and said that this program was a complete mess. I do not write to the Auditor-General lightly. I said, ‘You really need to look at this use of taxpayers’ money, the management of the department, because the minister has carefully made sure that the internal audits that were being done were looking not internally at the department’s workings but at the department’s association with ABSA and the department’s association with other people.’

I am very pleased that, as a result of my letter to him, the Auditor-General has agreed to do a full audit of the department and how all this debacle occurred. But that is not going to take us forward on the key questions that I think the government has to address. The first is that it needs to reinstate some green loans. You have to be able to borrow some money when you get your report; otherwise, what is the point? You will have a report in your hand but to no end. Where are you going to get the money from to actually implement the report? Secondly, the government needs to look to the quality of the reports that have already been done and conduct a reality check on the ground in those houses to make sure that the reports are reasonable.

Third, there will have to be an audit of the nature of the training that all the auditors did and some fair process, because it simply would not be fair to keep the 4,000-odd people who are registered with the government at the moment and to keep out other people who have been trained and accredited when there is such uneven quality. That means offering people the opportunity to upgrade their training at Commonwealth expense or, alternatively, offering for them to be compensated and to be able to withdraw from the scheme. We have got to have some way of doing this fairly, and it is no use saying: ‘I’m sorry. This is a hard decision. Some people are going to miss out.’ They are going to miss out because the government made such a mess of this in the first place. It is absolutely imperative that the government recognise, as they did with the insulation scheme, that there needs to be compensation. They need to sort this out now in a fair and just way and make sure that there is some compensation and that people are allowed to leave. I particularly want to hold the government to account for Stephen Berry’s promise that the government would fund upgrading to certificate IV, and for saying there was no training program in place in the first place. Yes, that is true, but there was a training program in Victoria that could have been used as an interim measure. Perhaps the minister will see that as an interim measure.

How can it be that the department embraces and launches a program and they do not even have a template of how you invoice for this particular program? They do not even have software that works. They do not even have their online booking service that they promised from day one. They do not even have their audit function. They have not got anything in place when it is launched. Then this debacle ensues over months and months. When people bring it to the parliament, the government says: ‘No, everything’s fine. We’ve fixed the software.’ Wrong. The software has never worked properly in terms of this program. ‘Oh, we’ve got the online booking system ready but we’re just not switching it on because if we do there’ll be this whole rush at the green loans.’ Well, the booking system was promised from day one. So I want to know: who is responsible to make sure we never have this debacle in project delivery again?

I want to make sure that we have a green loans program moving into the future that has green loans at the end of it and that has high-quality assessment reports on households that people can have confidence in and know are an accurate assessment of the energy efficiency of their home and the improvements that could be made. But I want to make sure that there is a fair and just way for some of the people who have in good faith entered this program to now be able to leave it, in terms of their training. It is a disgrace that you have people out there, as this person says—and he is not the only one—surviving on credit cards, edging dangerously closer to bankruptcy every day. Several people have had to sell their car, for example. There are all sorts of human tragedies here. It must be addressed.

The Prime Minister cannot take responsibility for insulation just because the community is so outraged about the fact that people have died as a result of that program. The community had every right to be outraged about that, and the Prime Minister was right to start looking at taking personal responsibility and at compensation. But on this one he has to do the same, and even more so, because this was not rushed through in the stimulus package. This was an election promise in 2007. It was in the 2008 budget and it began on 1 July 2009. It was a supposedly well thought through election promise, a budget responsibility. It had a lead time since the government came into it. And it was an utter and complete debacle. How can that be? How can it be that a Rudd government promise with all that lead time ends up with every single aspect of the program being mismanaged, to the tragedy of families around Australia, to loss for the environment, and to loss of consumer confidence in the transformative nature of these programs to the low-carbon economy? That is something that the government will be held to account for by the community as we approach the federal election.

Question agreed to.