Page 668 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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roofs. We see potentially hundreds of thousands of homes which have ended up with either shoddy insulation or unsafe insulation. At the end of it we see an industry thrown into turmoil because the government has had to abruptly cancel this program that was so monumentally mismanaged by the federal Labor government.
We need to, I think, reflect for a moment on just how badly this has been handled and the impacts of it, because there are many of us in this place who believe that a well-managed home insulation scheme could have a lot of benefits. If it was well managed, it could have had benefits for the environment; it could have had benefits for householders; it could have had benefits for the economy. But in the end what it has done is undermine confidence in the insulation industry.
It has undermined confidence, I think it is fair to say, clearly in Minister Garrett and the federal Labor government. I think it will cause future policy makers to pause or, hopefully, to pause before rushing out programs. But I think where it has had a negative impact is that it will undermine community confidence in many of these programs which may be well intentioned and which, if they are managed well, could have a lot of benefit. But alas, that has not been the case.
We note the federal Senate passed a censure motion of the entire federal government yesterday in relation to this and other programs. I think that is a rare event. I think that is a relatively rare event when the Greens, the Liberal Party and others get together in the federal Senate to censure an entire government for a program. I do not think we should in any way skate over that fact.
We know that there are house fires being investigated in the ACT which may be linked to this program. So we need, first and foremost, to put that on the agenda. I will go into some more detail on that.
Secondly, this motion is about what the ACT Labor government, particularly the Attorney-General, has had to do with it. Most importantly, I think, when we first had the opportunity to ask questions on this in the Assembly, what we got was misleading answers. What we got was incorrect answers from the Attorney-General. What we had even, I think, yesterday was more evasion on this program.
There is no doubt that this is, first and foremost, the commonwealth Labor government’s failure. There is no doubt about that. Minister Garrett and others within the federal Labor government have monumentally stuffed this up, with all of the consequences, the serious consequences, for life and property and confidence that have flowed. Indeed, now we are seeing the turmoil in the industry as a result of how badly this has been mismanaged. There is no doubt that the blame, first and foremost, lies with them.
But we also know that there is a role for state and territory governments in relation to this program, in relation to regulation, in relation to safety and in relation to protecting citizens within their jurisdictions. And that is where we get to the second part, I think, of the motion. We asked, I think, very legitimate questions of the Attorney-General. He did not actually do the work; he did not actually ask his department, perhaps: “Do we have any documents? Do we have any documents about this scheme? Have we had correspondence?”
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