Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Deregulation, Competition Policy and Sustainable Cities) Share this | Hansard source

Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and related bills have been characterised by a number of speakers before me, so I will not go over the details. I am always curious when I hear about Operation Sunlight being an effort by the Rudd Labor government to suck up cash out of departments which are squirreling it away. That seems to be what we are doing now to try and fund the extravagant expenditure of the Rudd Labor government that is part of these bills. Then there is a further allocation for a number of programs that others have spoken about. I want to touch on a couple of those programs.

There is a department that features prominently in these two bills, and that is Minister Garrett’s department. The Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is mentioned in these bills. I wonder why there seems to be so little interest from Minister Garrett in making sure that the programs that his department is operating are not bungled and are properly managed and I wonder how much effort has gone into that aspect of the administration of the department. I particularly refer to one that I have spoken about previously, the very troubled Green Loans Program. I recounted late last year that, despite a lot of flamboyance, prominence and big promises about what the Green Loans Program would do, our inquiries through the estimates process and through parliamentary questions on notice revealed that, despite big talk dating back to October 2007 about just what this program would do, as of 18 August last year not a single green loan had been granted. This came as a shock to me.

What I must say is that those seeking green loans had already been shocked long before I was. They had gone through in good faith the process that had been outlined for obtaining green loans, after many false starts about its kick-off date and the fumbles and the fake promises that have been characteristic of this program, to find that all is not as it had been made sound to be. In the lead-up to the last election, there was talk of 200,000 homes being able to get concessional loans subsidised up to the value of $10,000—the value of the loan—with interest payments subsidised by Rudd Labor. It then drifted and started to look a little bit different.

By May 2008, Minister Garrett was talking about green loans for Aussies and how all this was about energy efficiency and was all provided for in the budget and that it was all good to go. A press release entitled ‘Green loans for Aussie homes’ of 13 May said that green loans were expected to be available by early 2009. This is the start of the date slippage that has surrounded this program. A few weeks later, the Prime Minister said in a statement:

That is why we are: helping Australian families take practical action to improve energy efficiency and save money in their homes and rebates, low-interest loans, energy-savings standards and better information.

That claim was made on 5 June by the Prime Minister. Anyone who heard would have believed that that was available there and then. It was not. There was still plenty to be done before that particular program would get off the ground.

As I said, even though statements were made on 5 June 2008 by Prime Minister Rudd that his government had these facilities available, questions on notice to the House revealed that statements by the Prime Minister about what was being done and what was available contrasted with the facts secured through the parliamentary process on 18 August 2009, over a year later, that not a single green loan had been made available. So we thought that we would dig a bit deeper.

We have had regular contact with home assessors. Home assessors are the very committed individuals and small businesspeople who go around visiting homes to identify sustainability improvement opportunities. That is the front end of this process. They get accredited, liaise with Minister Garrett’s department to identify homes to assess, they carry out the assessment and then some time later a report goes to the home from Minister Garrett’s department to advise about things that can be done to improve the sustainability of that home and as the key input to accessing a green loan.

I have had former members of the ACT legislature, who are not necessarily fellow travellers of mine in a political sense, outraged that they have been waiting month after month after month for that report to come back. They have been waiting month after month for the key piece of evidence that a person needs to have to access what until 18 August 2009 was not green loans but the idea of a green loan. They need this home sustainability report to go to their bank to seek an opportunity to get this very elusive green loan.

I was advised that, despite repeated contacts with the department, a former elected representative, very committed to sustainability, could not even get that input document. He could not even get what was promised and is supposed to be routinely available just a few short weeks after the assessment. Months and months later, phone call after phone call later, Minister Garrett’s department continued to fail to make the material available. I contacted that person and said: ‘Look, I understand your frustration; we’re getting this story everywhere we go. But there is one upside: at least you got an assessment.’ He said, ‘What’s the problem?’ and I went through the problem with actually getting an assessment.

Right across Australia there are people who are qualified to do these assessments. In good faith they undertake the training. They invest money, they pay the fees to get registered and they undertake the courses that are required to secure the accreditation to be someone who can carry out that work. There are community organisations right across Australia helping with that process. I am grateful to my parliamentary colleague the member for Gippsland, Mr Darren Chester—and I will not mention the particular community organisation because they have asked me not to, but they are involved in training people for this green loans program. They point out that it is not cheap, but a qualified, properly trained, home assessment person is a condition, a fundamental starting point, to get a green loan. They are an organisation committed to sustainability and they thought they would get involved. They have taken on students to secure a certificate of achievement and then to be registered with an organisation that verifies the credentials of the assessor. They need a police check, a registration fee of 650 bucks, public liability indemnity insurance—another 750 bucks—the course itself, which costs $750-odd, and all that is involved with getting their accreditation. That is quite an outlay.

The organisation has now been told that there is a moratorium on having these appropriately trained and prepared people who have invested their money in becoming assessors. There is now a moratorium that says, ‘No, we’re not accepting any more assessors.’ This dictum from the minister’s department fell out of the sky, with all those involved in trying to implement this bungled program left holding the baby, incurring the expense and not being given the opportunity to do what they entered into in good faith on the strength of what the government asked them to do.

I feel very sorry for ABSA, the Association of Building Sustainability Assessors. They are the organisation charged with verification and certification of these home assessors. ABSA do that work on behalf of the Rudd Labor government and Minister Garrett. They are now in the firing line because, even though it is not their call to end registration of home assessors—that has been decreed from the department—they are at the pointy end having to face the music of people who have invested thousands of dollars to participate in this program, based on the false promises that that opportunity was available, even though they know, as everyone does, how bungled and troubled this whole program has been from day one.

To their credit, ABSA are allowing people to withdraw their applications if caught in this bind, a bind not of ABSA’s making. Alison Carmichael has been at pains to explain that they are caught in that squeeze but they are at least happy to work with people, where they can, to mitigate some of the expense, inconvenience and hardship of the bungled handling of this program. They are a not-for-profit organisation and they should not be stuck in the line of fire by Minister Garrett.

Minister Garrett needs to recognise that that is a problem in the program: the accreditation and the way in which people are appropriately qualified to carry out home sustainability assessments. There are people following in good faith his encouragement and his department’s encouragement to go down that pathway who are being completely done over by Minister Garrett and his department in the way they are mishandling and bungling this program. So I feel sorry for Ms Carmichael. I recognise that she has had a difficult job dealing with the surge of interest in the program and the need for proper accreditation of appropriately qualified people, but now she is at the pointy end, when Minister Garrett and his department decide to turn the tap off and say ‘no more assessors’.

That is just the assessors. But, if you do happen to get certified and you happen to be in a position to carry out those assessments, what you need to do then is contact Prime Minister Rudd’s environment minister’s department—Minister Garrett’s department—and get on to their call centre to be allocated a job number. So, if you want to be paid, you need to get a job number first. Today 30 people are being laid off in an eastern Melbourne business set up to administer and implement this scheme. Thirty people are losing their jobs and that small business is facing going under because of the bungling of this scheme. Why? Because of this requirement to get a job allocation.

Let us do some very basic maths. Thirty assessors may be able to do four or five assessments a day. Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, you are quickly doing the maths there, but it is somewhere between 120 and 150 assessments a day. What if I said to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that to get a job number—remember, that one number that lets a single assessment take place, bearing in mind that this small business is geared up to do 120 to 150 a day—you would have to have someone sit on the phone for nearly two hours to get through to the call centre and talk to someone to get this elusive job number? You might think a two-hour wait to get job numbers for 120 to 150 jobs is just an inconvenience and is not so bad. Maybe, but what if I told you that you were rationed to five numbers per call? How many people do you need camped on phones all day, waiting up to two hours to get someone to talk to you, to get a maximum of five job numbers if you have a business that is looking to do 120 to 150 assessments a day? There is no business case model in the world that could make that work. But that is the bureaucratic bungling, misadventure and mismanagement that Minister Garrett is sitting over.

So what has happened? Thirty people are losing their jobs today in eastern Melbourne at ALPHAgreen. My thoughts are very much with all of them and their families as, in this difficult economic climate, they contemplate how they may find employment opportunities. Do you know what the real answer is? Fix the system. Fix the system, Minister Garrett. Why should he fix the system? Because he already has. Do you know what Fieldforce, the organisation based on a similar model, get to do? They get allocated a batch of job numbers: ‘Here is a batch, guys. Knock yourselves out. Fill in the details. Send them in by spreadsheets. We’ll do it that way so that you don’t have to spend all your time and employ an army of people camped on the phone, waiting to get a maximum of five job numbers after a two-hour wait, so you can go and do your home assessments.’ Do you know what ALPHAgreen and Mike and his team wanted to do? Just the same thing: to contact the department and outline the details. Do you think they got any help? No. ‘I told you: you can’t have the system that Fieldforce has.’ Why? There is no explanation: ‘You can’t have it.’ Thirty people today are out of work and a small business is going down because of ongoing mismanagement of this system.

I call on the Rudd Labor government and I call on Minister Garrett to get his funky moves happening and to get his butt-cheeks over to his department and get this fixed. This has been a bungled program from day one. There has been issue after issue emerging. It is costing jobs. It is costing people their small businesses. He needs to get on with tackling these things. It is not because he does not know about them. People have gone out of their way to try and make him aware of these problems, because we are all committed to improving the sustainability of our nation. We would all like to see these opportunities embraced for homes. Everyone is keen to get involved, but the only obstacle is Minister Garrett and the mismanagement and bungling of this program. He should talk to Mike Stratell at ALPHAgreen. He should get on the phone today and say: ‘Mike, I am sorry I have caused you so much distress and I am sorry those 30 people have been laid off today. We will fix this.’ He could honestly say there are a lot of things to fix with this program: ‘We will fix this one because it’s costing jobs, it’s costing us small business and it’s further damaging the credibility of this program.’

I will move onto another sustainability program in the time that is available to me. Some years ago I pursued the vision of the southern solar city in the wonderful metropolis in Melbourne called Frankston. My heart skips a beat as I think of my home city. The Howard government had the Solar Cities program, and I had heard a lot of talk about having these solar cities in places where there is stacks of sun. We have stacks of love and many nice days in Melbourne but there is not as much sun as there is in some other cities. My argument was that we should have a southern solar city to prove that the photovoltaic technology and solar opportunities were effective and should be embraced even in the more temperate climates, with the more temperate citizens of Frankston city. We did not quite get the funding there, but we will persist. We will persist in a vision that says Frankston should be the southern solar city. It should embrace home sustainability opportunities like we have described that should be available under the bungled Rudd government program, but because of mismanagement it is harder than it should be. We can look at solar opportunities for electricity generation across a range of community uses. We can educate people about how they can make simple choices that improve their energy efficiency and the sustainability of their lifestyle, all of which combine to create practical emissions reductions.

That vision is alive. But do you know what I am faced with? I am faced with having to pursue this vision under the Rudd government’s so-called smart grid. Anyone who knows anything about smart grids will know they are wonderful technologies that are very important to the electricity sector to try to manage and balance fluctuations in energy supply and availability and to take account of renewable systems that may come in and out; for example, to let home appliances know that if you are a fridge and it is the middle of the night and nobody is likely to open the door for six hours, you probably do not need to fire up if you are one degree Celsius over what the normal fridge temperature would be. It is about using smart technology to link up these elements in the electricity generation, use and supply system.

It is an important vision. It is a funky term, too. It is so funky the Rudd Labor government have decided to pick up the term but not the concept. They have a smart grid program. There is $100 million to buy one community—one—a smart grid, so they say. I think 31 out of 35 energy companies said they had no ambition for smart grids like that just yet. They use it to diagnose faults in their systems and for workarounds when there is a fault. They use it to manage their own network and their supply obligations. The Rudd government, in true form, has the post-it note of smart grids without the contents sitting behind it.

But there is a bag of money there. I am supporting my community to get that bag of money to implement our southern solar city vision, mindful of the fact that it is a completely dishonest distortion of what smart grids are about in the way in which the Rudd government is implementing the program. We are bringing together all of those concepts of home sustainability assessments, weatherisation, smarter use of technologies, replacing old and inefficient appliances and looking at renewable energy and photovoltaic generation. There are all of these good things, none of which are dependent upon or are an essential component of a smart grid. But that is the brand of the program. Isn’t it funny how something as important as the southern solar city and the concept of more sustainable urban environments gets pursued through a complete misuse of a funky term that the Rudd government will now use to say that they are so cool they are into smart grids, whereas they have a program that does not even require a smart grid to access the money.

This is my dilemma: I will support that project because it carries forward a vision I articulated some years ago for the southern solar city based on Frankston city. But it is under a smart grids program where there is nothing smart about the smart grids program, because it does not actually talk about smart grids. That is just what we are faced with, with the Rudd Labor government: we will get the spin of the smart grid without actually having a smart grid. Isn’t that cunning? Isn’t that brilliant? ‘We are all about smart grids!’ ‘Have you got one?’ ‘No, no—we’ve got a program that’s called smart grids, and all the stuff you do on it is completely unrelated to a smart grid but we’re calling it a smart grid.’ Isn’t that the greatest thing? How cunning. Isn’t that sweet? Isn’t that so quintessentially Rudd Labor government? Use the brand and the funky terminology, look so future orientated that they will talk about stuff in 2050 and not worry about the next year. Use a brand that has nothing to do with, and requires nothing that is related to, a smart grid. Isn’t that just cunning? Who could have thought it? What cunning soul would have thought of that?

In the last few seconds that are available to me, I will talk about community infrastructure projects.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

In terms of the local and regional community infrastructure projects, how can the Rudd Labor government go past building a sea wall at the Frankston Safe Boat Harbour, a commitment that I made for the previous Howard government? I urge a close examination of that project.

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