Page 670 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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If those warnings are correct, regardless of whether you say they have to comply with the Australian standard and they have to do this and they have to do that and there will be this level of regulation, what is fundamental about the reports of that meeting is that they were told that it does not matter if you do those things, the very nature of how you are doing it will make it impossible; you will not be able to regulate it. These are some of the fundamental questions the minister has to answer.
It is worth going through the warnings that were there. Mr Garrett received over 20 warnings—warning after warning after warning. We had it from the National Electrical and Communications Association. We had it from a letter to the department from EE-Oz. Then we had a media release from the South Australian Labor minister for state and local government relations warning of a fire risk.
Interestingly, after the April meeting and teleconference, we had the WA government putting out a very strongly worded warning about the fire risk. We did not see any such warning after that April meeting for the people of the ACT. Where was the information to householders accessing the scheme? “In the opinion of the ACT government, this is fundamentally flawed. In the opinion of the ACT government this scheme is fundamentally unsafe. It will lead to bad outcomes. We can’t actually guarantee it. We don’t have the resources to be able to properly regulate it because, by the nature of it, through the speed of it, we are going to attract so many shonky operators that we simply will not be able to guarantee in any way that they will meet the Australian standards, that they will meet safety standards, that the standards for their employees will be up to scratch.”
That was what was discussed; that was what was reported. We need to know why that warning was not then passed on because, if that was the view within the ACT government, if that was indeed the view, the people of the ACT should have been told that. They should have been told: “Before you access this scheme, there are some things you should know. We will try to regulate it but we will find it difficult. We will find it difficult because of the very nature of the scheme.” There does not appear to be any evidence that the ACT government, after that meeting, gave any such warnings. We had a general warning or a general advisory to the industry. We had some discussions about some complaints that had been raised and we had later stronger warnings towards the end of the year. That is broadly the picture of what we have got.
This motion seeks also for the ACT government, firstly, to release all of the documents that they have. Mr Corbell said there are no documents. Then we learnt that there is an MOU. Is that the only document? I do not know. Only the department—and the department having searched two weeks after this was first raised in the Assembly, we would assume that that work would have been done—should know. Is it a couple of documents? Is it a lot of documents? I do not know. The minister can answer that. But whatever it is, whether it is a couple of documents or many documents, they should be released so that we can get the full picture.
There does not seem any reason not to do that. And given the minister believed there to be none just a couple of weeks ago, we cannot imagine that there are thousands. We cannot imagine that there is a monumental task for the ACT government to get the
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