Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the ANAO report into the government’s Green Loans program. Here we are in a new parliament and the Labor government’s failures of the previous parliament continue to dog them. There continue to be hangovers from the previous parliament. Of all the hangovers that the government faces—including the Building the Education Revolution, the home insulation scandal and, in due course, the National Broadband Network—there is no hangover greater than the Green Loans program. The Green Loans program is a great big hangover for this government. It will hang over their heads for the life of the parliament as many thousands of people continue to suffer as a direct result of the Labor government’s mismanagement of this program.

Let us be under no illusions. The government try to explain away the home insulation and BER programs as being rushed because of the global financial crisis. But the Green Loans program was a 2007 Labor election promise. It was conceived before they came into office, and still they totally mismanaged it at every step of the way. This is just the latest damning report—a report into their mismanagement of the Green Loans program. The ANAO has found:

The primary cause for the administration problems encountered by the program was, to a very large extent, an absence of effective governance by DEWHA during the program’s design and early implementation.

That’s right, the flaws in this program were there from day one, from the very moment the new government came into office. They received the brief: ‘Here are your policies. Here’s what we have to implement.’ The flaws were evident from day one as the department started to implement this program. And yet they were unable to identify or fix the problems at any stage during the process. It was a $300 million program and there were flaws from day one1 but still they could not identify them.

As Senator Milne alluded to, the problems within the department were systemic—so systemic that the Audit Office has found:

Procurement activity in the Green Loans program over a period of approximately 18 months was poorly managed and involved extensive non-compliance with government and departmental procurement requirements (including multiple breaches of the Financial Management Regulations related to the approval of spending proposals and contracts ...

The report found multiple breaches of government financial regulations. That’s right, what we are essentially talking about here are breaches of the law. The program was so maladministered by the former minister Peter Garrett and by that department that it led to breaches of the government’s own financial management regulations tabled and passed through this chamber and the other place. That was the extent of the maladministration in the Green Loans program. The report went on:

Key program management plans, including in relation to risk management, procurement, IT and communications, were never finalised and endorsed by executive management.

That’s right, risk management plans were never finalised for this program. Procurement plans were never finalised. It is no wonder they were breaking the government’s own financial management guidelines. They had not even finalised procurement plans before they went out and spent millions and millions of Australian taxpayer dollars in this wasteful manner that we have come to see so often from the Labor government.

ANAO went out and surveyed some of those who were involved—the householders who participated and the assessors who undertook the assessments and the home sustainability audits as part of the Green Loans program. What did ANAO find? They identified poor assessment conduct practices. That is hardly surprising. As Senator Milne said, there was no registered or recognised training program that the assessors had to undertake. It was all done on a wing and a prayer, with the government setting up a program that did not give them some type of lasting qualifications that might help them in the future. It left the government totally exposed to the waste and failure of this program.

Respondents to the assessors’ survey also expressed a general lack of confidence in the accuracy of the assessment tool. So the assessors were not trained properly and the tool they were using to assess people’s homes from a home sustainability perspective was not up to scratch. They found that some reports contained anonymous results and incomplete cost and savings information. So the whole program, which was based around the idea that a trained assessor would go into your home, undertake an assessment and provide accurate information on how you could reduce your energy usage and make your home more energy efficient, was flawed at every step of the way. The assessors were not trained appropriately and the tool they used for assessment was so flawed that it provided false data.

I come back to the fact that millions of taxpayer dollars went into this program but it has delivered a disastrous, terrible outcome. There has been a terrible human toll for the hundreds of thousands of Australian households who participated, or wanted to get an audit done on their homes and considered taking out a Green Loan. Also, financial institutions were stuffed around and dragged into something which very few people ever cleared enough hurdles to manage to take up. Eventually the axe fell on the financial institutions’ involvement, with no warning from the government.

In particular, there was a toll for the thousands of ordinary Australians who were passionate about the environment and saw an opportunity to help the environment by becoming home sustainability assessors. They signed up for this program believing it would provide them with skills and work. They believed that they would be able to build, in many cases, a small business or an independent contractor operation that was sustainable into the future. What has the Audit Office found? They found:

The number of contracted assessors ... quickly grew to levels significantly beyond what DEWHA had anticipated.

That’s right, they were all contracted to the government, and the department was just contracting all of those who trained. They never set any clear targets or caps, but just signed up far more than they expected. As a result, their entire bookings process and the entire process for considering assessments broke down. But most importantly, the report found that the government’s decisions and mismanagement ultimately ‘left thousands of assessors, who had each invested their time and around $3,000 on training, insurance and registration, with unfulfilled work expectations’.

‘Unfulfilled work expectations’ is the polite way of saying that thousands of assessors were without any work. Many more were underemployed. On a con from this government, these had invested thousands of dollars of their own money, not to mention their own time, in training for this program. They were left with nothing at the end of it—nothing at all—because this government and this minister could not manage to administer this program correctly. The program has been shifted, stripped, from Minister Garrett as so many things have been.

We discovered in the other place today that, even though Mr Garrett is the minister for schools, he has no responsibility for the Building the Education Revolution Program—not just no direct responsibility, not even representational responsibility. The government does not trust him—so much so that they will not let him answer questions on behalf of Senator Evans. No, they now consider it to be part of the jobs area and shunt it off to somebody other than the schools minister. It has been shifted to a different department. But even that different department has yet to determine a methodology for measuring the performance of the Green Loans program against its objective. We have a new parliament and theoretically—as we keep being told—a new government; and the new department does not even know how to measure the success of what everybody knows is a failed program. It really has been a great disaster by this government. The Audit Office report shows systemic failures—from the program design right through to the implementation. It says:

… the former Minister received incomplete, inaccurate and untimely briefings on program design features and implementation progress, challenges and risks—

and that he ‘was not well served by his department’. We live under a Westminster system—or so we are told—so the buck is meant to stop with the minister. Sadly, in this case it has not, and it is a disgrace that the former minister still sits around the cabinet table.