No one is responsible now. We have come to a new point in Australian politics today. Ministerial responsibility is gone and a new system of no one is responsible for mistakes has replaced it.
The scrapping of the home insulation program will come to haunt this Labor Government. It makes a complete mockery of Kevin Rudd’s claims to be a man who governs by following proper process. The whole sorry story is a text book example of what happens when public servants without experience in administering major contracts are told to spend money in a hurry.
Over in the Environment department there are a whole lot of serious and well-meaning men and women who are well qualified to identify the energy saving, and thus environmental, benefits that an insulation program brings. They have no qualifications at all to spend billions to achieve their aims.
As I have written before, this Government initiative, commendable in its intentions, attracted spivs aplenty because of a naive belief that the market would work it out. Just as bankers left unfettered throughout the world plundered billions so, too, in Australia have hundreds of unqualified smarties got their hands on millions for work they did sloppily or in many cases work they did not do at all.
The price has been paid by four relatively untrained workers — recruited to take part in the rort — who died in ceilings and by thousands of Australian home owners who now have at best insulation that does not insulate.
And no one is being held responsible!
Some idle speculation. I cannot believe that the heads of the Environment and Prime Minister’s departments did not alert their respective bosses to the contents of the report by Minter Ellison outlining the risks in the insulation scheme. That is just too “Yes Ministerish” to be believable. What I can believe is that the report was delivered to the respective ministerial offices where it raised such alarm that a decision was made to give a short verbal briefing on the contents along with the suggestion that the report not actually be read so innocence could be pleaded if things ever went wrong. Such, I fear, is the way of modern government.
Ignoring the good news. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. This Labor Government is going down the gurgler of public opinion because of that Peter Garrett fellow and a jolly good read it is making. At last we journalists in Canberra can report a real election race so how dare that Gary Morgan fellow try and say it isn’t so. Simply don’t report the finding released on Friday that his poll shows Labor has re-established its huge lead in public opinion. That’s how to handle that.
I mean, how dare he say this when the collective wisdom of the press gallery is that Tony Abbott is making up ground and is now in with an excellent chance of winning:
The latest Face-to-Face Morgan Poll conducted over the last two weekends, February 6/7 & 13/14, 2010 shows the ALP (57.5%, up 1% since the last Face-to-Face poll conducted on January 23/24 & 30/31, 2010) maintaining a strong two-party preferred lead over the L-NP (42.5%, down 1%).
The ALP primary vote rose 1% to 47%, well ahead of the L-NP (37%, down 1%), while looking at the minor parties shows support for the Greens (9%, up 0.5%), Family First (2%, up 0.5%) and Independents/ Others (5%, down 1%).
Give us Dennis Shanahan’s view on Newspoll any day. At least he knows how to make things interesting.
For those of you who enjoy being kill-joys, here is the Morgan verdict:
A warning sign. With a couple more interest rate rises being foreshadowed by the Reserve Bank governor, the release this morning by the Housing Industry Association of its housing affordability index should have the Government concerned. According to the association, housing affordability nose-dived at the end of 2009 due to “the perfect storm of higher house prices, increased interest rates, and the winding-down of the first home buyers’ boost.”
Yet another reason to punt on the Morgan poll correctly reflecting public opinion and scurrying off to a double-dissolution election.
Richard
No one is being held “politically” responsible. All of the worker fatalities are being investigated by the OHS regulators in each relevant State and the Coroners are most likely to be involved as well. The employers will be held responsible for the deaths of their employees but what penalties are applied is anyone’s guess.
The mismanagement of a government funded scheme is likely to be a contributory factor to the way the insulation contractors started up and managed their own staff, according to all the media reports, of which I have participated as well in the SafetyAtWorkBlog.
It will be interesting to see what reasons/excuses the insulation company owners give for placing their employees at risk. CountryWide Insulation has already started saying that they weren’t responsible as they didn’t employ the installer who died. Expect considerable argument to occur on the issue of contractor management. For the record, work may be contracted out but the occupational health and safety responsibility cannot. (There are similarities here with “chain of responsibility” except that the legal link to the Environment Minister does not exist)
The OHS investigations could be complex depending on the parameters set by each State’s legislation and enforcement policies, and there is no guarantee that the investigations will lead to Court. On this, it is a wait-and-see.
Kevin Jones
Right up until last Friday I could, with difficulty, swallow the line that the problems with the home insulation program were primarily the fault of the State regulators. But the scrapping of the program throws all that out the window. It is an admission that there was something fundamentally wrong with the program after all.
Something the minister was warned about. Repeatedly.
Something he continued to do nothing about, not until people started dying, but until the story got a big run in the media.
He should go.
Good to see you’re awake, a few years late, but…….
For 11+ years under Howard, there was a queue for evading “ministerial responsibility”, and politicising the PS became the norm under Howard – that’s “how government worked”, and “now” there’s some sort of surprise?
Funny to hear Coalition participants in the latest Senate committee, asking “is that normal” for a minister not to read certain politically embarrassing “research findings”, that allow these earstwhile representatives of the people to give their confected outrage a pubic run- after only 2 years away from the trough, they can’t remember how it worked when they had the same wheel?
Their ministers read everything as soon as it came off some press? And there’s no evidence that they didn’t?
And these same “selective amnesiacs” want another turn at running the joint, ASAP?
Poor old Pete
Its moments like these
“You need Minters”
The government has every reason to be worried. They have an army of people in offices in Canberra who are so preoccupied with their own careers and ambitions that they will not let bad news reach the ears of the Minister and bully anyone who might make a Minister aware of what is happening. How many of the many letters written to the Minister actually make it to the intended source? The Minister shows a lot of naivety in his dealings with his Department. For that he should resign. His Secretary should go with him.
The fundamentals of the public service need to return to a more hands on approach rather than contracting out which carries many risks to the Minister. The Howard decision to separate policy from delivery in the Public Service means that many decisions are being made by pompous mandarins with no intention of ever letting the Minister actually know what is going on. Kevin Rudd should have taken the option of the night of the long knives when he could. He bears much of the blame for this failure.
As it is all Government Ministers should go and take a tour and meet the staff at the lower levels who live outside Canberra who know a lot more about what is going on than their masters will ever let the Minister find out.