Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document Auditor-General: Report No. 9 of 2010-11: Performance audit Green Loans Program: Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, and Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

The Senate will recall that on 4 February this year I wrote to the Auditor-General asking for an immediate and comprehensive investigation into the gross mismanagement of the Green Loans scheme by the then minister, Mr Peter Garrett, and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. I pointed out at the time that the Green Loans scheme was an excellent idea but had turned into an utter debacle through gross mismanagement by the department. I pointed out that the Greens had been and remained the strongest advocates in the parliament for household energy efficiency upgrades and that the Green Loans scheme was based in part on something that the Greens had taken to the election campaign in 2007. Tragically, the way that the Green Loans scheme was administered turned into a nightmare for the people who became assessors and for many householders who sought an assessment and energy efficiency technologies put in their houses.

I wrote to the Auditor-General and pointed out in the letter that the program had gone so badly wrong at every single level. It was not as if one thing happened and the whole thing went as a domino effect after that; every aspect of this program had been mismanaged from the start. I pointed out to the Auditor-General that there had been failure to adhere to the promised 1,000 to 2,000 limit on the number of assessors, failure to deliver on the online booking mechanism, failure to provide or oversee the interim call centre booking process, failure to administer the conditions the federal government placed on its own program regarding conflicts of interest and probity in terms of procurement, and failure to exercise quality control and due diligence in relation to the standard of training provided to prospective assessors and the quality of the assessments provided to consumers. I also asked the Auditor-General to report on the failure to implement an audit facility in the program and on favouritism and discriminatory practices relating to access to work through the program. The Senate will recall that I asked the minister representing the minister at the time, Minister Wong, about how it was that Fieldforce were able to book assessments over the summer when the system was down and the independent assessors were not able to get that work.

Now the Auditor-General has reported, and his report confirms largely all of the criticism that had previously been made by the other assessments of the Green Loans Program, including the Faulkner report. The Auditor-General has said that the problems besetting the scheme were largely due to ‘an absence of effective governance’ in the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. I will say that again: ‘an absence of effective governance’. This was not just one person. This was systemic lack of effective governance in the department.

What is even more worrying is that there was clearly no oversight in the department at the highest levels; and what I am sure is shocking to people aware of this program is that the former minister—and I quote from the report—‘received incomplete, inaccurate and untimely briefings on program design, features and implementation progress, challenges and risks’. In other words, when the minister sat down to find out from the department how the Green Loans program was going, he was given inaccurate, incomplete and untimely briefings.

My question is: who is to be held responsible here? Clearly, there are real problems with procurement and that goes to the issue of Fieldforce, which I raised in the Senate previously. The Auditor-General finds that Fieldforce did gain market advantage due to the way this program was designed. He also acknowledges that Fieldforce did not seek that market advantage but got it nevertheless by virtue of the failure of a range of things—from the booking program and the failure to have an online booking system and the failure to adhere to proper processes throughout the program.

The Auditor-General’s report goes absolutely into all the problems, as I indicated. It points out the failure to have proper budget oversight of the program. It points out that at the executive level they seemed not to know what was going on and did not take much notice at all. But where I am disappointed with the report is that there was a lack of probity on procurement processes. There is even prima facie evidence of contract-splitting to avoid the mandated requirements of the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines—if you split the contract you did not have to go through that. A whole lot of these procurements were poorly planned and recorded. There was poor management of requests for quotes. The majority, 96 per cent, of the procurements examined were procured through direct source—that is, without open competition. This is in complete breach of all of the Commonwealth requirements and is very serious.

One of the heartbreaking parts of the Green Loans program is that a lot of people embraced it and thought this was their opportunity to become part of the new green economy. This was their opportunity to get a career path in energy efficiency, recognising that energy efficiency was going to be a growth industry this century—as it ought to be—in the demand management of energy. However, as the Auditor-General says, the majority of assessors have been trained by unregistered training providers. That is the Commonwealth’s fault, because it did not set down that there had to be registered providers training the assessors. There was also the issue of the number of assessors. The assessors were led to believe there would be somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 assessors. It turned out that almost 10,000 people had either been trained and accredited or trained and then got contracts and so on in the course of all that. Part of the whole debacle here has been: how do you rationalise that many people when clearly there is not that much work for them?

The assessors ended up complaining that the tools they were using to assess energy efficiency were not right. There were real problems with the calibration of these tools. Nothing happened about that. The Auditor-General agrees in the end that these problems occurred for the assessors. But right on the death knell of the election the government requested expressions of interest for the Green Start program. When it abolished Green Loans it went to Green Start, which is being unkindly referred to in the community as ‘Newstart’ because it is not giving any real assistance to a lot of the assessors other than just directing them to income support. The issue here is that the closing date for expressions of interest was the day before the election. I called for that to be extended because it was really unfair on assessors who were submitting expressions of interest not to know what the situation was going to be. However, the government did not extend the period of the Green Start program.

I really want to see this situation followed up because it is an issue of natural justice. The Auditor-General has stopped short of saying there should be compensation. I think there should be compensation and I intend to take this matter up with the new Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mr Dreyfus, who has been given responsibility for this area of government administration.

I thank the Auditor-General for his comprehensive report. He has found all the problems that we identified some months ago to be valid concerns. He has pointed to systemic governance failure in the department and has said that the department is now taking steps to fix it. But the issue is: who is going to be held to account? If the minister was not given the information he needed, who in the department was responsible? Why did senior management not oversee this? How were the procurement guidelines so easily sidestepped?

There is a real problem in this department and it has to be fixed. I do not think it is enough to just say that it is being fixed. We want to know how it is being fixed. Not only do we want to know which individuals in the Green Loans management sector might now be examined in relation to this matter, but also the systemic failure of the department needs to be explained. The assessors need to know that there is going to be natural justice—that there will be upgraded training for some and compensation for some. Something has to be done about what I believe is a large group of people in Australia who were seriously let down by the government of the day with the Green Loans program.