Page 673 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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insulation policy but also in relation to the green loans policy. Again, this is another sound policy which has been brought to its knees by maladministration.
The remote renewable energy project, for the most part, was re-announcements of things that had previously been promised by the Howard government. The only thing that they have really managed to do in that place is re-announce things. The process of rolling out renewable energy in remote areas has ground to a halt. It never got off the ground, I suppose is more accurate to say.
But the important thing is that not only has there been a policy failure, which is interesting to observe from a public policy point of view at the commonwealth level, but that policy failure affects people in the ACT. We do not know the extent to which high-quality insulation has been rolled out in the ACT and there are a number of houses—we do not actually yet know the number of houses—that have been insulated under this program in the ACT. There are real issues.
I was speaking to a couple of young tradesmen last night. One of them was my son. He was listening to the news about this. He said, “How can it be that a tradesman who has installed insulation now gets to certify that it is okay?” Young people who do not have all that much experience in the world can see the folly of Peter Garrett’s policy and the Rudd government’s policy here.
It is important that this minister, who is also the minister for emergency services, the minister responsible for ensuring that fires do not break out in people’s roofs, who also has a whole range of responsibilities for fair trading, take some initiative and actually do something to protect the lives and property of Canberrans and to protect the investments of Canberrans. And we actually have to see, first of all, the minister fessing up to what his agencies knew, what the planning minister’s agencies knew in relation to this, what are they going to do to learn from this and to make sure that the policies being implemented at the federal level will actually ensure the quality, the safety and security of ACT taxpayers.
This has been a monumental failure. But it is not just some academic monumental failure. Houses have burnt down and young lives have been lost. Families have been dislocated. Families have been dislocated by the loss of their property and the disruption to their families. But more than that, four families in this country have been thrown into complete disarray by the deaths of their sons. And now we see, in addition, for lots of people who are unskilled and semiskilled and who had jobs in this area, where we were going to have green jobs for the future, their green jobs for the future ran out last Friday.
There was a young lady on television last night, a single mother, saying, “I’m going to lose my job. I have not done anything wrong but Peter Garrett does not seem to be going to lose his job.” I think that that will be repeated over and over again by people who have been suckered into this industry and they have been suckered in in such a way that the industry and the whole area of development will be somewhat discredited by the poor management of the Rudd Labor government and Peter Garrett in particular.
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