Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable the Leader of the Nationals proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The Government’s failure to properly manage its health and infrastructure programs

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Four young men dead, 105 house fires, 1,000 electrified roofs and probably many thousand more, 240,000 dangerous or substandard insulations, up to 30,000 lost jobs, hundreds of small businesses heading for liquidation, three companies so far charged with fraud and hundreds more to come, at least 21 explicit warnings of danger ignored, a $450 million bill to fix up the mess, and estimations of compensation claims perhaps as high as $1 billion—that is the tragic tally of personal, environmental and economic disasters created by just one of the Rudd Labor government’s programs. And the government expect the Australian people to give them a second term, to give them more opportunities to administer programs in this kind of shoddy way! They expect us to give them more opportunities to affect the lives of thousands of Australians in an adverse way.

They criticise us for obstructing their legislative program. They expect us to support their other grand plans, like the uncosted National Broadband Network—what a debacle that is! Before the election it was going to provide, for $4.7 billion, a high-speed broadband fibre-to-the-node system to 98 per cent of Australia. The first connections were going to be made by Christmas 2008. Now it is only 90 per cent of Australians who are to be served. Two million people have been excluded, mostly in regional areas, including every town under 1,000 people, and the cost is $43 billion. What is more, nobody wants to build it. There is no plan. All they have got is a plan to belt up Telstra to a pulp.

The reality is that this government has failed. It cannot administer programs. It has failed to deliver, and Australians are suffering from its incompetence. I do not think I have ever in my life seen a program more poorly managed or so disastrously administered as Labor’s Home Insulation Program. Yet not one person has actually lost their job over this appalling debacle. The Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts is still drawing the same wage. So is the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Government Service Delivery. So is the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. So is the Prime Minister. The minister for the environment has been asked to take the rap. This ‘first-class minister’ has been hit with a supercharged feather, but all he is doing is playing in a smaller chook pen. The reality is that he has had to take the blame, and he must be looking with angry eyes at the ministers sitting alongside him who are getting off scot-free. The blame certainly lies higher up, amongst ministers who were part of this so-called project control group that had responsibility for the devising of the program early in the piece.

In question time on 24 February, when asked about the government’s insulation program, the Prime Minister acknowledged that ‘in the early part of 2009 an initial risk assessment was done for the cabinet’. So cabinet was told to have a risk assessment done—according to the words of the Prime Minister—by February 2009. There was an additional assessment in April—the Minter Ellison report, which has been ignored. In fact, the minister said that he did not even see it for 10 months, in spite of weekly reports from his department on the progress.

The project control group should have been well and truly aware that they were acting with a program which had considerable dangers. In fact, on 24 February in this House, the Prime Minister said, in commenting on the insulation program:

I also draw the honourable member’s attention to the fact that in 2008, against an industry that at that stage was rolling out something in the vicinity of 50,000 to 75,000 retrofitted insulations each year, the number of fires was, I am advised, something in the order of 83.

The Prime Minister was talking about 83 fires in the insulation programs; yet here he was ramping up a program 10 times bigger—100-fold—and no measures were taken to ensure that there would not be 100 times more fires as a result of the program they were implementing. The government are culpable in this area. They were warned. They knew that there were serious issues associated with the development of a program of this nature, but the Prime Minister and other senior ministers took no action to intervene. Now there is a tally of death and destruction which is plain for us all to see.

It is also a major disappointment that there has been such a trashing of confidence in the roof insulation industry—a legitimate trade which has effectively been ruined. Stefanie Balogh, commenting in the Courier-Mail, wrote:

The Rudd Government’s $2.45 billion home insulation program ended up turning into a magnet for every cowboy in town.

It was certainly a magnet for rorts. Let us look at a few of the rorts that have so far been identified—and there are undoubtedly many more. There were really no quotes below $1,600 ever given, even though the average cost for roof insulation was only $1,200. The government woke up to that months and months later and reduced the amount of the rebate. But, again, there was never going to be a quote below that number because the government were prepared to give out $1,600 without even asking any questions.

The government have clearly paid scores of claims—maybe hundreds—for jobs that were never done, for households that do not even exist. Two quotes were required but often they came from the same company. There was quote collusion between companies to share the jobs between them. Quotes were made by using Google Earth. People did not even bother to inspect the houses; they just found the house on Google Earth and then sent a quote in the mail. They used substandard insulation—batts cut in two. Companies were passing themselves off to householders as being government agencies. Fly-by-night installers were leaving botched or difficult jobs incomplete. No-one took any action to intervene. And the companies responsible for dodgy insulation are now being told that they can inspect their own work and repair it.

The opposition brought to the attention of the House in question time a couple of weeks ago the plight of the Smith family of Gympie. Mr Smith said that the installers cut rolls of fibre insulation the wrong size and left the cut rolls uninstalled in his roof cavity. He said that the installers fell through the plaster ceiling above his bedroom wardrobe, that they behaved in a threatening manner when he became upset and that they suggested that they sort it out at the pub when his wife ordered them out of the house. Two months later, the installers had not been in contact to repair the damage. The Smiths called the police, who were also called to investigate another incident, apparently involving the same people. This is the kind of behaviour that the government was subsidising through its ill-considered and inappropriately supervised program.

Electricians had been warning for ages that the use of foil insulation in homes could be dangerous. Kyle McKennon said that he always believed the use of foil insulation in homes was a disaster waiting to happen. He said:

From the moment I heard about this the alarm bells started going.

David Benjamin, from Kawanna Electrical at Buddina, said:

The whole concept of putting a conductor in a ceiling cavity is absurd.

Mr Benjamin went on to say that he had received numerous calls from people who had had foil insulation installed and were now concerned about their safety. Is it any wonder? One suggested that the minister might like to get up in the roof and put his finger on the insulation to test for himself whether or not their roof was electrified.

Stan Dennis, an electrician from Nanango with 50 years experience working in the electrical industry, said that if anyone has aluminium foil in their ceiling, they should get rid of it immediately. David Elston, an electrician from Cooroy, called my office to warn that rodents chew cables in the roofs of homes. He stated that even if there was an inspection done one day and considered okay, the next day a cable could be chewed by a rodent, making the house unsafe. An article in the Sunshine Coast Daily reported:

Charlie Gardener ... said he was angered after visiting several retirement villages where residents’ homes had been fitted with the potentially dangerous foil which he believes “doesn’t even work”.

Several months ago he wrote to the Federal Government about his concerns, but never received a report.

The government were asleep at the wheel. They were not on watch. They were not doing what they should have been doing when supervising a massive multibillion dollar program—a program which has had such disastrous consequences. The editor of the Fraser Coast Chronicle wrote in the editorial:

Before the program was introduced I got a quote to insulate my home in Grafton and it came in at $1700. After the rebate scheme was announced I got new quotes. Both were more than $2200.

The rorts were happening every day and the government were doing nothing about it.

Now, of course, the government have set up a complaints inquiry line. You can ring a number to get some assistance. Caulfield man David Wise, 78, was reported in the Herald Sun as saying that when he rang the government hotline yesterday he was told it could take five years to get his insulation checked. And today the minister made some similar comments this morning when he said that he had no idea at all how long it was going to actually take to inspect all of these roofs and all of these insulations.

The government has now passed this program on to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. I do not think that department has the kind of record that would give you any confidence it was going to be able to fix the mess. Today, the parliament has given the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency another $20 million for office space. Some of that is going to be taken over by the people who are supposed to fix this bungled program, but it is also going to house 150 bureaucrats who have been employed to administer the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. What Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme? It is not there, yet 150 bureaucrats are moving into $20 million worth of new office space so they can administer the program. The Treasurer acknowledged on 4BC in Brisbane that the legislation was not going to pass. We have had other ministers going around the press gallery saying that the CPRS is dead.

The public servant who heads the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency really belled the cat. The Canberra Times reported that he was blunt when talking to the staff on hearing the news that he was to administer this program and said that the public servants responsible for dealing with this insulation debacle have been through hell. He said:

You have not had ... the resources that you needed to do the job and even if you had, there are inherent policy design flaws ...

He said that he did not feel he could do much better and said:

It’s not like the DCC has any expertise in this area. DCC is not a program manager ...

The government have now handed the responsibility for fixing the mess to a department that says straight out: ‘We’ve got no expertise in this area. We know nothing about it.’ This has been a bungled program from beginning to end. Mr Garrett has taken some of the heat but the reality is that the whole government are culpable for incompetent administration and they are showing no signs yet that they are actually going to do anything to fix things.

But that is not the end of this government’s inabilities. A government which could not give away home insulation during a heatwave is now asking us to trust them to run the hospitals. The New South Wales Labor government have already produced a list of 117 district hospitals, community surgeries, psychiatric facilities, multipurpose hospitals and nursing homes that they believe will close as a result of the Rudd Labor government’s new hospitals program. New South Wales have named their hospitals that are on Labor’s closure list. Why don’t Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory do exactly the same? We need to know who is on the hit list. Which hospitals are going to take the hit because of Labor’s proposed new arrangements?

Labor’s health plan will not produce one extra dollar for health. Simply rebadging some of the states’ GST money and calling it federal money does not make the amount of money available for hospitals any greater. And they are going to set up an extra level of bureaucracy. What hospital services are going to be cut? We were told yesterday that the Prime Minister is going to reward hospitals that produce good results. Where is that money coming from? What services are going to be cut to enable those rewards to be paid?

No-one should ever have any confidence in a health scheme administered by this Prime Minister. When he was running Queensland, to use his own words, as chief adviser to the Goss Labor government, he abolished local hospital boards—the very boards he is now proposing to build. He also closed hundreds of hospital beds across the state. He has form. He has a record in managing hospitals and it is a disastrous record. He began the demise of the great Queensland health system and he should not be trusted with the national health system. (Time expired)

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been a most interesting contribution to this MPI from the Leader of the National Party. We have had a tirade of, I think, 17 or 18 minutes against the government’s comprehensive plans to deal with the problems that we have outlined in the Home Insulation Program and about three minutes on health which I suggest gives us a very good idea of the opposition’s priorities when it comes to one of the most important reform agendas before us today.

As the Leader of the National Party knows full well, about this time yesterday afternoon the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency provided the House with a comprehensive ministerial statement of how he plans to deal with the problems in the Home Insulation Program. In his usual forensic fashion, he comprehensively went through all of the problems and was completely open and direct about the number of houses that will be inspected as a result.

Interestingly, just in the last couple of days I spoke to an installer in my area in northern Sydney—a legitimate operator; someone who has been in the business for about 10 years—who runs a company called Safe and Sound Insulation. He talked about some of the problems that he has had and it was encouraging to hear him say to me, ‘I want to be part of the solution.’ I have passed that information on to the minister’s office. This is what we intend to do: work with those legitimate players in the industry and deal with the problems in the Home Insulation Program.

I think that the Leader of the Nationals has kept us here on false pretences. What is the title of this matter of public importance? The title is:

The Government’s failure to properly manage its health and infrastructure programs.

Maybe this is accidental, but I think there is word missing from the title of this debate and it is ‘former’. I think it is as clear as day that when we talk about a ‘failure to properly manage health and infrastructure’, it is the former government that is inexplicably linked with abject failure to manage health and to manage infrastructure. You know, it is a failure we on this side of the House have to contend with every day in government. It is a failure that those opposite should reflect on. As I have said before, I think the members opposite should reflect long and hard on the sorry legacy of their 12 lazy years in government. While the bounty rolled in from the years of prosperity, members opposite sat lazily on this side, of course, and did not do the heavy lifting on infrastructure. I will come to that issue first.

I do think the Leader of the Nationals has a hide to bring up this debate today when job figures show our unemployment rate effectively holding steady at just over five per cent. The national rate of unemployment is 5.3 per cent, while many of our major trading partners struggle with an unemployment rate of 10 per cent. The United States has 9.7 per cent unemployment, the United Kingdom has 7.8 per cent and in many of the European countries—the Euro zone—it is 9.9 per cent. If we look at the figures for full-time work, today’s ABS figures show that full-time employment actually increased by 11,400 jobs. That is full-time employment. As the Deputy Prime Minister has pointed out, our steady result in the move to full-time employment shows something very important. On this side of the House we all give employers great credit. Employers around the country who worked with their staff and unions to keep people in jobs can now begin to raise the number of hours available to workers each week. This is what I hear across the country from employers. It has been an extraordinary collective effort by them. It just goes to show, on a day such as this, how out of touch the opposition are when they can come into the House today and try to make a lie of those figures by denying that the Rudd government has kept our economy growing by investing in infrastructure—and, foremost, it has kept Australians working through the global financial crisis.

There is not a shred of a premise for the Leader of the Opposition in this misguided, muddle-headed debate that he has brought on this afternoon when today’s job figures show the national unemployment rate is 5.3 per cent. That is positive news in relative terms, but of course we do not for a minute take for granted the more than 128,000 Australians who have become unemployed since the onset of the global financial crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008, nor do we forget the total number of unemployed Australians still sits at just over 615,000.

As the Deputy Prime Minister has pointed out, there are still pockets of very high unemployment in Far North Queensland and in western Sydney. The government has many programs that are addressing problems in those areas and indeed in the other 20 priority areas where we have local employment coordinators working intensely with partners to ensure that there is a good employment plan and people are able to get access to training programs. The Rudd government continues to support jobs with stimulus and with priority employment programs in all of these areas. Indeed, when I crisscross the country and I talk to local government shires across the country, mayors, deputy mayors and councillors say to me just how vital the stimulus has been at every level. Whether it is the regional and local community infrastructure program, whether it is the $1 billion we have provided to every shire across the country, or whether it is the stimulus infrastructure funding we have provided to large- and medium-scale projects right across the country, the result is a continued endorsement by employers of the government strategy to provide stimulus to the Australian economy during the GFC—a strategy which is being gradually wound down as the economy improves and as jobs growth returns.

I have talked on this topic before when the Leader of the Nationals has led off in a debate. I do not think he gets infrastructure, because the last time he brought on one of these debates on infrastructure I reminded him of his own failure in his electorate of Wide Bay—specifically for those people travelling on sections of the Bruce Highway, a dangerous stretch of road if ever there was one, and the Leader of the Nationals of course studiously ignored this during his years in government.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He was the minister!

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right; indeed he was. This is in spite of his own admission: ‘This is a dreadfully accident prone section, rated the worst piece of the highway’—

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You said this last time!

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am reminding the Leader of the Nationals—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Nationals has had his turn.

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am reminding the Leader of the Nationals, because there seems to have been a little bit of amnesia. I think this is a tradition of his—his somewhat silly Thursday afternoon debates. I do not want to sound repetitive, but let us say that those sitting opposite need to be told things a few times before they sink in. I am sure it will be a case of deja vu all over again. I am pleased to tell the House that, since the last time I spoke on this, I have been in Gympie to open the $70 million upgrade of the Bruce Highway that goes through Gympie. The Leader of the Nationals is nodding and saying, ‘That’s right.’

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you for coming!

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My pleasure, and a lovely part of the world it is. The works were finished three months ahead of schedule. Let us go to unemployment again. I have just talked about the fact that we have an unemployment rate of 5.3 per cent. Why do we have that figure? The widening of the Bruce Highway in Gympie generated 164 direct and indirect jobs during the construction phase, and that upgrade is just one of any number of projects funded as part of the Rudd government’s record $2.6 billion investment in the Bruce Highway.

While I was there, I took the opportunity to inspect the progress on the Cooroy to Curra, section B component, of the Bruce Highway upgrade, and the earthworks there are quite something to behold. The builders there, as the Leader of the Nationals would know, are the large construction group the Abigroup. They have made huge progress. This is a $613 million upgrade that is jointly funded with the Queensland government. As you know, that is one of the busiest stretches of highway. It currently carries around 15,000 vehicles a day, and these works will ensure that the highway can meet increasing demand.

In contrast to the opposition, the Rudd government is determined to improve safety on the Bruce Highway. I know the Leader of the Nationals will be interested in this, because we have just heard from him about the importance of safety and he has talked to us about a tally of death and destruction. As the Leader of the Nationals well knows, there is a tally of death and destruction when it comes to—

Consideration interrupted.