Senator RYAN (Victoria) (3:05 PM) —I move:
That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senators Birmingham, Ryan, Colbeck and Boswell today relating to the home insulation program and to renewable energy.
If it were not for the tragic elements of the Home Insulation Program, it would be fit for a skit by Monty Python. Here we have a government that announced a program to spend billions on pink batts and foil in people’s ceilings. It was warned about the program from day one from this side of the chamber. It was warned by experts, by businesses in the field and by the people who did this work at the time. It was warned that the dramatic expansion of the program by simply showering an industry sector with money would lead to shonks, would lead to homes being ill-fitted and would be dangerous.
For several weeks the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to deny that it was warned about the dangers of this program. People lost their lives and houses were burned down, and we do not know what will happen in the coming weeks and months, but at no point has the Prime Minister or any of his ministers stood up and apologised to those families for the harm that this policy has caused. This government sought to expand an industry by a factor of more than 20 in a matter of weeks. I was on the Senate committee that inquired into the stimulus package, and this issue was covered—the issue that you cannot pump $2 billion into a sector in a matter of weeks hoping that a dramatic uptake of inexperienced and unskilled labour will perform this task safety and efficiently.
This government has achieved something that I do not know of any other government in the history of this country having achieved—the creation and destruction of an industry in an 18-month period. Hundreds of businesses have been put out of business. Many of them were legitimate businesses which saw the government pouring money into home installation and decided to tap into it, but at the same time there were a number of shonks. We do not know how many there were, and we may never find out. The government is now promising to try to chase them up, but if that attempt turns out to be anything like the government’s home insulation scheme we know we will never find out.
This government cancelled the scheme after these tragedies occurred, despite having had warnings beforehand, and threw hundreds of people out of work. Not only that but the shonks in this industry have now unnecessarily caused grave concern to thousands of Australian families as a result of this government’s flawed policy. I ask the government: if you had had foil installed in your roof in the last 12 months, how would you feel right now? The government is not even promising to investigate every single home that has had foil installation installed. The problems may not be limited to foil; we do not know yet because there has been absolutely no oversight of this program.
Today, I asked Senator Wong: if these homes get checked what is going to happen to the enormous amount of foil that there will be after this insulation is removed? The minister could not say. Is it going to landfill? There is another cost there. We do not know when these homes are going to be checked, we do not know the cost and we do not know the implications. What we do know is that hundreds of millions of dollars—billions of dollars, potentially—have been wasted on a policy which this government is now trying to run away from in spite of the fact, and the opposition will not let the government forget this, that it was warned about this from day one.
The government justified this policy on the basis of both stimulus and environmental sustainability. Are we going to hear that the hundred million-odd dollars that it is going to take to fix this bungled policy is somehow part of another stimulus package? Nothing from this government would surprise me. Earlier today, the Treasurer, Mr Swan, outlined how fixing the bungled policy that started with the waste of money will lead to budget cuts in other programs. So are we to expect another private health insurance rebate reduction bill based on the ‘saving-a-home-from-Labor’s-insulation-scheme program’? Is that what we are to expect in this place?
Finally, I comment that there was an interesting article in today’s Australian, with experts in the field punching a hole in this government’s claims about how this program was meant to save energy and reduce the carbon footprint of homes. This policy is undoubtedly the worst that this country has seen. It is probably up there with various things undertaken by Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns.