Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In question time today, the Prime Minister whitewashed the sins of the minister for the environment in relation to the Green Loans Program. In response to a question from the member for Parkes, she selectively quoted from the ANAO report on the Green Loans Program to indicate that it was the department that did it. Let there be no mistake: it was the minister that did it, and the sins were great.

The report builds upon three previous reports commissioned by the department in relation to the failed Green Loans Program and what it found was a manifest failure in governance of a government program. This was whitewashed by the Prime Minister of Australia as if to exonerate a minister of the crown. That whitewashing indicates that, far from being a parliament that will release light upon areas of government failure, this parliament will be engaged in cover-up.

The whitewash today was a shameful act of prime ministerial negligence. What we saw in the Green Loans Program was, for the best part, a waste of $275 million of public money. It was a program characterised by rorting, waste, maladministration and a manifest failure of governance, as recognised and reported in the Auditor-General’s inquiry. This should be enough to damn any minister, but under this government, under this Prime Minister, the standards of ministerial accountability do not exist.

The Prime Minister ignored two absolutely critical elements: firstly, the reason within the Auditor-General’s report—which clearly she has not read herself, although she taunted others on that fact—that this program was allowed to fail and be subject to a lack of governance was found by the Auditor-General to have been that the departmental officials were caught up in trying to fix the Home Insulation Program. So the minister’s failure in one area is cited by the Prime Minister as an excuse for his second failure in another area. It is almost laughable that the Prime Minister would use this report to try to whitewash the sins of the Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts, as he then was, before she promoted him to the current position of Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth.

The second thing that Prime Minister ignored is that there were manifest, clear, open public warnings throughout the last half of 2009 and the first half of this year. In August, in September in October, in November and in December of last year, on their own words the Australian sustainable building association warned the minister. They made these warnings in public—that the Green Loans Program was failing, was unsustainable and would be unsuccessful. They made these warnings in private in a way which has subsequently been released. So this was a manifest failure of governance, a failure of oversight, a failure of duty, and all whitewashed today.

The Prime Minister has said effectively that there are no standards of failure under her government which are too great to be whitewashed. This was not the first such sin; this was the third. The second was the failure of the Solar Homes and Communities Plan, a program again which ran out of control, which had an $850 million blow-out despite evidence of mass rorting. And most importantly, the third strike was the Home Insulation Program, which has been explored in detail elsewhere.

The echoes of that program continue today—a $2½ billion program of which $1 billion comprised the cost to fix the roofs. That is the greatest failure of a program in Australian political history. It is not just the money, though; it is the fact that there have been almost 200 house fires, that there have been 1,500 electrified homes, that there have are 250,000 dangerous or dodgy roofs and, above all else, there have been four terrible human tragedies. Today we have seen a Prime Minister fail in her duty to uphold ministerial responsibility. Three strikes and the minister should be out.