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

There is a song of which the refrain comes to mind, ‘If it feels good, do it’, but in the case of the Rudd government it is more like, ‘If it sounds good, let’s promise it and keep promising it for as long as we can get away with having it sound good. And when it comes to D-Day’—that is, delivery day—‘we will break our promise or, if we proceed to try and deliver, then we will mismanage and the botch the delivery and create nothing other than waste in the process.’

If it sounds good, promise it. ‘If it sounds good, we will promise Fuelwatch.’ It sounded good, alright. Did it do any good? No. ‘GROCERYchoice sounds good, so we’ll promise it.’ Did it do any good? No. ‘Computers for every school kid: sounds good; let’s promise it.’ Did it do any good? No. ‘The Building the Education Revolution: sounds good, so we’ll promise it.’ Has it delivered value for money? No. And that is the least of it. ‘The Home Insulation Program—stimulating the economy, creating jobs and protecting the environment: sounds good; let’s promise it.’

In this process the Rudd government has turned its back on the most fundamental of its promises that could have helped it to deliver some good from what sounded good. That most fundamental promise, given by the Prime Minister himself, was evidence based policy. With any of these promises, had the government bothered to keep that promise—to actually do a cost-benefit analysis, to map the problem that they were trying to fix or the good that they were trying to do and show that their policy was going to achieve it—then they might have avoided the waste and mismanagement that is tragically unfolding with broken promises and botched delivery daily.

The Home Insulation Program: sounds good—stimulate the economy, create jobs and help the environment. There was no evidence base for the Home Insulation Program. It was characterised instead by haste to get the money out the door at all costs—pun intended. The top priority was to get the money out the door; little else mattered. Those were the writing instructions. That is the evidence behind the scenes that we would get, if we could get it, through the Senate committee process attempting to do its best to show the Australian people what they deserve to know about the management of the Home Insulation Program.

The Rudd government promised that the Home Insulation Program would stimulate the economy—we were told at the time. It is a broken promise, particularly with the budget, because we now see that all the Home Insulation Program is going to do is realise the warnings that the government got in its own independent risk analysis from Minter Ellison. More than a year or so prior to today, and certainly months in advance of rolling out the program, the Minter Ellison risk assessment foretold that if the risks identified in that assessment were not addressed, then there was every prospect that the program would cost more than any money it was ever going to bring into the economy. Sadly, that is exactly what is now set to happen with the home insulation debacle, as most recently proved by the budget delivered by the Treasurer this week.

All that the Home Insulation Program is going to do is break the first plank of what the program was supposed to do and which sounded good: stimulate the economy. No, it is going to back money out of the economy. Create jobs? Please, tell that to the Australians who came to the industry at the behest of the government. They answered the government’s call yet many of these workers had their jobs destroyed overnight by the stroke of a ministerial pen when Minister Garrett first suspended and then scrapped the Home Insulation Program—not that I am suggesting that that was not the right thing to do. It was just after too many months, too many millions and too much waste—too late.

The third plank of the Home Insulation Program was to supposedly help the environment. How can a program help the environment when it has not been evidentially assessed and when the wrong insulation is put in the wrong sorts of houses in the wrong places for the wrong sorts of climates? How can a home insulation program help the environment when in tropical Queensland, insulation is laid underneath corrugated iron roofs, which naturally attract condensation due to the tropical climate? How can that insulation help the environment when it collects moisture and risks not just the insulation becoming mouldy but also ceiling collapse? How can the wrong insulation in the wrong sorts of houses in the wrong sorts of climates help the environment?

How can the Home Insulation Program help the environment when everybody other than the government seems to be saying that every home that has had insulation laid under this program must at the very least be inspected? There will be quite a few damn carbon miles created in inspecting all that has been laid. What to do once it has been inspected? There are electrical risks waiting to be realised. There is dangerous and dodgy insulation waiting to be realised. What to do then? It is not so simple as to rip out the foil insulation, for example. There is evidence to the Senate inquiries into the Home Insulation Program that much of the insulation that has been laid is not biodegradable. What about the environment in that?

What is to be done if insulation—for example, foil—is ripped out and the electrically risky staples remain, which the electrical experts say still leaves electrocution waiting to happen who knows when? What to do about that mismanagement and the waste that comes therefrom? The Home Insulation Program sounded good but did no good at all. Indeed, it has created—I am sure unintentionally, but it is so nonetheless—tragedy and destruction rather than construction of anything good.

Round 1 of the National Broadband Network sounded good in its promise to connect some 98 per cent of Australians at a cost to the taxpayer of some $4.7 billion. The $4.7 billion debt, of course, did not sound very good to the Australian public, but some 18 months after the making of that sound-good promise, and some $30 million of taxpayer expenditure on that promise later, the government decided to up the ante with something that sounded even better. So it broke the NBN round 1 promise and made the NBN round 2 promise. In making the NBN round 2 promise, the government is now telling us that it will spend up to $43 billion of taxpayers’ money to connect some 90 per cent, maybe, of Australians to a fibre-to-the-home network. It sounds good, but look at the government’s track record on promises broken thus far and botched delivery and look at the clues as to why. The clues, as I have said, are no cost-benefit analysis and no delivery on the promise of evidence based policy.

With the National Broadband Network round 2, Minister Conroy suggests all will have been revealed by now in his implementation study, which he has belatedly released. All that the implementation study, that $25 million taxpayer spend for some 500 pages—and we do not want to contemplate how much taxpayer money has been spent per page on that diatribe—