Page 677 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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knowledge, even if it was gathered by junior officials, that the insulation program brought on an additional risk. Failing to disclose that risk to installers and the community as soon as is practicable should be acknowledged as a failure. It is the responsibility of ministers to create environments within departments to ensure information as critical as this is quickly transmitted from junior officers to the relevant area within the government, so that a decision about how to respond can be formulated.
Whilst the broader scope of this motion reflects major issues with the federal government’s implementation of the insulation scheme, we are concerned that the ACT government was warned about potential dangers in April yet waited until November to issue a hazard alert. We are concerned that the government is only able to talk about the lack of complaints and not the proactive measures it has taken to inspect and prevent unsafe workplaces beyond issuing advice. We have consistently raised, in conjunction with our health and safety issues, the need for the Office of Regulatory Services to be active and visible in enforcing workplace safety standards, not just responding to complaints.
There are lessons for all of us in the federal government’s failures; lessons particularly for the ACT government as they move to develop policy responses around the ACT’s energy future and the feed-in tariff.
The first is consistency; the industry need consistency. They need clear signals about the level of government support for programs, how long that support will last, and when and how that support will be wound back. Because of the scale of the products or installations they are dealing with, industry lead times are often higher than those of the average householder. A few months notice of a change of policy may be enough for householders, but industry may require a longer period. Long-term signals will encourage businesses that are in the game for the long haul, and these companies are the type of companies that we want to encourage—not the speculators, the cowboys and the fly-by-nighters. We want to encourage the companies that are committed to safety, that are committed to on-the-job training and to the development and implementation of industry standards.
The next lesson is auditing. One of the criticisms of the green loans program was the failure to put in place an auditing system to ensure the quality of training, assessments and use of the loans provided and to promptly identify and weed out anyone trying to rort the scheme. We have seen here in the ACT how a lack of auditing can undermine the effectiveness of other energy efficiency initiatives. Energy efficiency ratings for houses are a prime example of this. When these ratings are never audited, there can be very little trust in the ratings and they soon become meaningless. We have houses which are just not meeting the energy efficiency they are rated at, and do not even meet minimum efficiency requirements.
Another lesson is the issue of safety, for both consumers and industry. It is obviously an important and key issue in this debate. Often when governments roll out new policy objectives they have unintended consequences. But sometimes those consequences are predictable. The lesson here is that when those consequences involve safety we cannot be too careful about the measures that are put in place to
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