Photo: Rachel Cobcroft/ Flickr
AFTER daylight saving was introduced in the United States in the early 1970s the television coverage of early morning traffic accidents intensified, leaving viewers with a strong impression that there was a link between the two phenomena. But there had been no change in the rate of accidents – the media coverage had increased simply because early morning accidents were judged to be more newsworthy in the midst of controversy over daylight saving.
A similar case occurred in New South Wales in the early 1980s, when the Wran government’s head of corrective services, Tony Vinson, sought to introduce urgently needed prison reforms. The new policy was portrayed in some sections of the media as a “softening” of the system, and from that point on every escape was treated as if it were a test of the reforms. Vinson’s policies had made escapes more newsworthy, and little attention was paid to longer-term rates of escape.
In both instances, the news coverage carried an imputation of causality – implicitly, in the pattern of attention, and explicitly, through editorial comment and in the reporting the views of critics. Preoccupied with the present and neglectful of the past, concentrating on individual events and ignoring longer-term patterns of events, the news media conveyed a false causality.
These two cases (and there are many other similar examples) make a useful backdrop to the controversy over the Rudd government’s home insulation scheme and the largely unexamined assumptions about cause and effect that permeated the media coverage. In some eyes at least, the government’s scheme was a morally culpable and scandalous failure. Typical of the journalistic commentary was Laurie Oakes’s description of the program as “a mess. A shambles. A disaster.” At every level it has been a political liability for the government and a triumph for the opposition. It dominated the media agenda for weeks, especially after the revelation that four workers had died while installing insulation and that there had been ninety-four house fires related to insulation. The controversy claimed half a ministerial scalp, with the demotion of Peter Garrett, and also managed to embarrass the prime minister and perhaps tarnish his credibility in the eyes of some potentially swinging voters.
The Coalition’s rhetoric was extreme and unqualified. It climaxed with Tony Abbott’s claim that if Mr Garrett were a company director in New South Wales “he would be charged with industrial manslaughter.” Abbott called the scheme “the most monumentally bungled government program in Australia’s history” and claimed that the government was in “electrocution denial.” His Coalition colleagues joined the attack, with South Australian senator Simon Birmingham claiming that the “greatest threat to the safety of many Australian families over the last twelve months has been the home insulation program.”
The opposition’s framing of the issue was reflected in most reporting and commentary. The narrative was one of disaster and incompetence, especially as the controversy gathered intensity. As Crikey’s Bernard Keane commented, “Once journalists get the smell of ministerial blood in their nostrils, the old higher brain functions start switching off and the pack instinct kicks in.” The government was constantly on the defensive.
Even the denouement (assuming that the affair has run its political course) further damaged the government. Just days after generously praising his environment minister, the prime minister demoted him. And after defending the program, the government suddenly terminated it. The sharp reversal brought fresh criticism, including a torrent of negative publicity about the jobs that would be lost because of the program’s suspension. “Having howled for the program to be shut down, the media and the Opposition [then decried] the consequences of, um, shutting it down,” observed Keane in Crikey. So the government got little credit for the program creating jobs but lots of blame when closing the program cost jobs.
The government also suffered an ideological defeat. The program was taken as evidence of Canberra’s incompetence rather than the shortcomings of small businesses. For John Roskam, director of the Institute of Public Affairs, “this is the problem of Canberra taking control of these big programs without experience.” The Age’s Shaun Carney thought that the “bungled” roll-out tested “Australians’ faith in big government.”
Beyond the immediate damage, the negative publicity fed into existing, damaging narratives about the Rudd government: that it is better at announcing programs than implementing them; that it loves the grand gesture but ignores the detail. Any government will suffer if the presumption of incompetence takes hold, as has become the case for the New South Wales Labor government, and the insulation controversy could damage perceptions of Rudd and his colleagues. Equally heartening to the opposition will be the perception that this case offers further evidence of just how easily Kevin Rudd and his inner circle are spooked when a damaging story seems to be running out of control.
The result is that the home insulation program has entered the conventional wisdom as an unequivocal disaster. To appreciate fully why that is a massive oversimplification, we need to look at three wider issues: the sociology of the economic stimulus; ministerial responsibility in the contract state; and the pre-stimulus history of home insulation in Australia.
Designing the stimulus
THE HOME insulation program arose as one part of the Rudd government’s economic stimulus package during the most foreboding days of the global financial crisis of 2008–09. Like its counterparts around the world, the government was seeking Keynesian solutions to the prospect of a deep and prolonged recession. The theory was that when market forces are working towards a contraction in activity it is up to government, as the biggest economic actor, to create a circuit breaker by stimulating economic activity and increasing demand. Later the boldness and speed of the Rudd government’s initiatives was often (and correctly) seen as causing some of the problems with the home insulation program, and this was usually attributed to the Rudd government’s wish to put the best spin possible on its actions. While true, it was also consistent with the economic demands of the moment, to make a fast and big splash.
As a tool of economic policy, the stimulus worked. Although other factors, including the strong demand from China and the sound position of Australia’s banks, were also important, the stimulus played a central role in making sure that Australia suffered less of a downturn than most other developed countries. The opposition has criticised the public debt that resulted, but compared with most other developed nations this is fairly small. Moreover, the capacity to repay that debt – and, in the meantime, to service it – has been greatly aided by the success of the stimulus in minimising unemployment and boosting output.
Conventionally, there are three main criticisms of economic stimulus measures. The first is that they often consist of “make work” jobs, which do no social or economic good beyond giving their occupants temporary employment, and disappear as soon as the government’s artificial stimulus does.
To preempt this criticism, any stimulus package should focus on projects that will have some lasting benefit, which makes the construction of infrastructure an ideal area. Providing home insulation, in this case, would not only create jobs in the short term but also have the longer-term benefit of reducing the power costs of each household and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, this was a well-conceived policy with both economic and environmental benefits.
The second and third criticisms relate to the way that government intervention distorts market forces and disciplines. Stimulus measures often lead to a sudden spike in demand in one area, but then this either produces windfall profits for a few suppliers or creates a situation where there is insufficient supply and standards drop. Similarly, the public subsidy leads to prices in that area becoming considerably inflated, and in some cases opens the way for fraud against the taxpayer via claims for services that weren’t actually provided.
Both these problems arose in the home insulation program. As the former treasurer, Peter Costello, said, “Once you announce there is $2.7 billion of free insulation to be distributed, you can hardly be surprised when contractors materialise from thin air to take up the business.” Especially as the program escalated in late 2009, the number of what have been dubbed “rogue” or “cowboy” operators is said to have increased. It also seems that because the public subsidy basically covered the cost of the service, many consumers were less than assiduous in monitoring either the quantity or quality of the work they received, and there may have been some fraudulent claims for payment for work not actually completed.
Ministers and contractors
WHICH BRINGS us to the issue of where ministerial responsibility fits into this mix of public funding and private delivery of services. The term “the contract state” was coined about forty years ago to describe the increasing number of services and products that are neither wholly in the domain of private enterprise nor performed by a government bureaucracy financed from consolidated revenue. They are services undertaken by private contractors at the behest of government, or made possible by government subsidy. Ranging from private schools and private hospitals to private electricity providers and private prisons, these have been increasing over the years.
The Westminster doctrine of ministerial responsibility, already problematic and inconsistently enforced, has not kept pace with this blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors. In the contemporary world, ministers are sometimes held responsible for their own actions. Very rarely are they held to account for the actions of their department, where there are typically debates over what a minister could have reasonably known or controlled. Ministerial responsibility for contracted government services is an even greyer area.
Under the Howard government, despite the Labor opposition’s best efforts, no official sanction was ever administered for any outsourced activities or the effects of the direct or indirect public subsidies to corporate entities. Thus the immigration minister was not required to resign after the suicides and other great human suffering that occurred in the privately run immigration detention centres implementing the government’s asylum seeker policies. The foreign affairs minister was not required to resign because of the way the corporate monopoly entity AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board) was dealing illegally with Saddam Hussein’s regime. When the Howard government’s policy of financially supporting child care through tax rebates for parents allowed that sector to become very corporatised, culminating in the collapse of the biggest corporate entity, ABC Learning Centres, no minister was held responsible.
In the home insulation case the Coalition was able to impose a definition of ministerial responsibility far more rigorous than anything previously associated with the Westminster system. Now ministers are not only responsible for their own actions, and those of their departments, but for private employers whose actions are subsidised by the government. As Bernard Keane wrote, “The crazy logic of the pursuit of Garrett is that he must take responsibility for the actions of everyone who has received government funding, no matter how irresponsible they are in their own actions.” Peter Garrett is probably the first minister to suffer a demotion because of activities by private contractors drawing on public money.
In the pursuit of the issue, Tony Abbott, Peter Costello and former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull presented characteristically contrasting styles. Abbott went straight for the jugular with the claim that Garrett could be charged with industrial homicide. This could have easily rebounded on him if a more critical media had branded the comment as outrageous and irresponsible. Instead it worked for him, raising the political temperature and dramatically putting the public focus on the government’s culpability. Equally characteristically, Costello was smugly dismissive of the whole insulation scheme, recalling in the Age that Turnbull had wanted to undertake a similar program in government, “dressed up as a climate change policy.” “I was against it. I couldn’t see why those taxpayers who had paid to insulate their own homes should subsidise insulation for those who hadn’t. The subsidy would only [emphasis added] increase the value of a private asset – the private home.” Costello says he saved Turnbull from what would have been a disaster, and “the voters saved $2.5 billion.” Under Rudd it was “rebadged as a stimulus policy” (actually it was titled “The Energy Efficient Homes Package”) and, inevitably, says Costello, it became a mess. Finally, and predictably, Turnbull mounted the most forensically (if not politically) effective attack. He said that the scheme showed again that Rudd is not a cautious, process-obsessed bureaucrat but rather a free-wheeling spin merchant, and criticised the lack of planning and preparation before launching the program. He also argued, quite plausibly, that if the rebate covers the whole cost of installation, then the householder has less interest in seeing it is done properly.
It is interesting that conservative critics studiously avoid acknowledging any difference between the actions of government bureaucracies and those of businesses receiving public money. Costello extended his critique of the home insulation program by proceeding to criticise “the idea that the Commonwealth should take over and run [emphasis added] public hospitals,” while the IPA’s Roskam attributed the problems with the home insulation program to “Canberra taking control.” In fact it is meant to be one of the virtues of the contract state that the public outsourcing of activities achieves market disciplines and efficiencies in contrast to government bureaucracies undertaking them.
Insulated from history
TO EVALUATE the achievements and failings of the scheme, it is important to recognise that home insulation was already a sizable industry. The government’s policy did not introduce new activities; it radically increased the scale of existing practices. So, in assessing the government’s responsibility for developments during 2009 and early 2010, the task is to disentangle which problems arose from an accentuation of existing sub-standard practices and which occurred because of an emphasis on quantity over quality and a drop in standards as new operators flooded into the industry. While some conclusions – for example, that the standard of work fell – are plausible, we can’t know for certain because there are no baseline measures of previous practices and outcomes.
In 2008, 3.18 million Australian dwellings (or 61 per cent) had insulation, and approximately 67,000 homes were insulated each year. The largest number of insulated homes had batts in the ceiling; a minority used foil. On average, between eighty and eighty-five fires per year were attributed to insulation faults, but no breakdown is available to show which of these arose from newly installed insulation and which from longer-standing insulation.
The Rudd government’s scheme was unprecedented in its scope, aiming to insulate two million homes in two and a half years at a cost of $2.45 billion. By the time the program was suspended last month, 1.1 million homes had been insulated with $1.4 billion approved for payment. These installations amount to roughly half the number of homes that had no insulation in 2008. It should also be remembered that the work done was disproportionately in older dwellings, which no doubt added to the difficulties of safe installation.
The benefits of home insulation have not been questioned by any of the program’s critics. The Department of Environment estimated that insulation would cut the normal household’s energy bills by around $200 a year. According to one estimate during the controversy, putting ceiling insulation in 2.2 million homes would save as much energy as taking a million cars off the road; a more conservative estimate said that 1.1 million insulated homes was the equivalent of taking 300,000 cars off the road. Another estimate said that ceiling insulation cuts household energy use by up to 45 per cent, while the Total Environment Centre said it would cut it by 25 per cent in centrally heated homes and 18 per cent in space-heated homes. Whatever the actual figures, the environmental benefits are clearly substantial.
When the program began, home insulation had few special regulations, although it was, of course, subject to normal work and safety provisions and employers’ duty of care. No certification was needed to enter the field, and indeed insulation was frequently installed by householders themselves. The lack of licensing and training in the area allowed sub-standard work to be completed and sub-standard occupational safety procedures to be followed. Although the numbers and proportions of each almost certainly increased as a result of the stimulus, the lack of existing safeguards also meant that an unknown number of instances of both shortcomings probably occurred in the past but had passed beneath the public radar.
Both licensing and training have been dramatically improved as a result of the program. As the increased scale and perhaps the decline in the quality of some work exposed more problems, the department mounted a national training and audit program, largely filling the regulatory vacuum that had permitted the previous abuses and problems. At best there is a grey area here. On the one hand it can be argued that it would be unreasonable for the department to anticipate all of these issues, and it can be argued that it acted fairly quickly once problems became apparent. On the other, should it have anticipated that such an expansion of funding would attract problematic operators and practices, and therefore acted pre-emptively?
“Every new fire and its front page headline will remind voters of the Rudd government’s recklessness and ineptitude,” the Australian’s columnist Janet Albrechtsen has written. Politically, she is surely correct, but that will happen largely because of the media’s innumeracy and lack of historical perspective. Under the program, the number of installations rose from 67,000 a year to 1.1 million; the number of fires rose from around eighty to 120. In other words, as Crikey’s psephological blog Pollytics has demonstrated convincingly, there is no statistical evidence that the existing problem of fires became worse with the program. Rather, because fires from insulation were now newsworthy and previously hadn’t been, this was seen as a new problem, one caused by the new policy, whereas in fact the number of insulation-related fires increased only slightly in absolute terms, and there was a decrease from previous patterns in proportional terms.
The most tragic aspect of the current controversy was the death of four young workers. Although the coronial inquiries are not yet complete, one apparently died from heat exhaustion on his first day in the job and two others from cutting through live electrical wires. We have no figures on deaths from home insulation before the program began, as the published figures have not been disaggregated from overall fatalities in the construction industry. But we do know that each year there are around 50 fatalities from construction work in Australia, and overall in Australia around 300 work-related fatalities. As Bernard Keane reported in Crikey, this number actually increased somewhat after the Howard government’s changes to the building code in 2004 – from 3.14 deaths per 100,000 in 2004 to 5.6 in 2006 and 4.48 in 2007.
Every one of the 300 work-related deaths that occur each year in Australia is a tragedy, not only the four associated with home insulation. Every one of them should be an occasion for examining existing policies and practices, and many of them should have received more media and political attention than they have. Few if any of them, though, should result in charges of industrial homicide against cabinet ministers.
Three of the deaths involved foil insulation. Foil seems to have particular safety problems in proximity to live electricity currents, both during installation and later, as conditions in ceilings change and some areas potentially become electrified. Foil has been used for decades and problems appear to have existed, unacknowledged, for a long time. Now, thankfully and at last, these have come into public focus. I do not recall seeing any warnings about the dangers of foil insulation when the program started.
Insulation proved to be a much more problematic industry than anyone anticipated when the government’s program began. Questions can be raised about the speed and adequacy of the government’s responses as problems came to light, but here even a harsh critic must concede that on several issues it acted fairly promptly and properly, although there is certainly legitimate scope for divergent judgements about this. Nevertheless this is a much more limited and partial sense of responsibility than could justify the general claims of recklessness and industrial homicide that became standard fare during the controversy.
THE HOME insulation saga has been indelibly defined as a fiasco. It will be used relentlessly against the government as incontrovertible evidence of incompetence. At the National Press Club debate on health this week, for instance, Tony Abbott said three times that a government that was incapable of rolling out pink batts couldn’t be trusted to run hospitals.
But what was most striking about the political controversy was the stultifying and misleading narrowness of the news agenda. It was depressing testimony to how seldom a complex or rounded picture emerges in political reporting. The trade-offs in policy – between speed and size on the one hand, and careful preparation and targeting on the other – never emerged in the news. The home insulation program had considerable flaws, but in news reports these all but completely eclipsed its virtues. The economic and environmental achievements of the program never came into focus.
The media controversy was framed almost entirely by the political conflict. The problems that emerged so spectacularly were a mix – in unknowable proportions – of shortcomings that had always existed in the industry, which now occurred in larger numbers because of the increased scale of home insulation activities, and shortcomings that the government subsidy and stimulus made worse because of the increase in unqualified operators and the lack of constraints on shoddy work practices.
As interesting as the urgent emergence of these problems under Labor was their previous neglect. Insulation-related fires and electrocutions had been beneath the public radar for a long time, probably decades, and they only received news attention because of the political conflict surrounding the government’s scheme.
The beguiling narrative of government blame and total failure owes quite a bit to a media that pursues controversies with little curiosity about history and a defiant innumeracy that treats every event as unique, and in the process presents a lop-sided causality and simplistic moral absolutism. •
Rodney Tiffen is Emeritus Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney
20 Comments
The media are still reporting fires as being because of the insulation and then showing the insulation singed but not burnt and the electrical wiring melted.
When will they get it through their thick heads that it is the wiring, not the insulation because most insulation does not readily burn.
My family used foil way back in 1964 and the stuff is still in the house, quite safe and still saving the owners money on electricity in one of the hottest parts of SA.
Thanks for this careful and reasoned analysis, it’s a keeper.
The selective outrage from a party that is pro private contractors and anti- working conditions is telling. The insulation cowboys in a parallel universe would be Workchoice poster boys.
Why did we get such shallow, partisan coverage of this issue? Could it be that the media want THEIR ‘stimulus’ money back – the billions that the Coalition gives them for government ‘advertising’, which is simply code for Liberal Party propaganda.
Media organisations are in the financial doldrums, GFC or no GFC. They want the Liberal ‘advertising’ gravy-train restored, make no mistake about it. Hence the disgusting campaign against a government that acted quickly and intelligently to stave off economic disaster.
Once again, it’s the Media versus The People.
Thoroughly researched, well written & presented save for one major flaw.
The statement:
“The home insulation program had considerable flaws, but in news reports these all but completely eclipsed its virtues. The economic and environmental achievements of the program never came into focus”.
Your upbeat rating of the economic & environmental benefits totally misses the reality of the HIP’s effects in these two areas at street level….by a country mile.
And it could have been avoided with some common sense from the PM & Deputy PM, who are up to their ears in the responsibility for the failed HIP.
Industry insiders told the PM’s department that the scheme, which effectively compressed nearly 40 years of growth, into 34 months, that it had no hope of succeeding.
Rudd’s background in diplomacy (i.e. you promise the competing parties that there’s definitely a way out of the problem, offer big $ as part of the blue sky…and then quickly leave to fight another day), underpins this fiasco.
Across Australia as I write this comment, hundreds of small insulation manufacturing business are haemorraging tens of thousands of dollars per week, as the new Minister Combet tries to sort out the mess.
Combet’s performance to date has been welcomed by industry insiders, but they need a solution to kick start their beleagued industry NOW..or sooner if possible.
Good article. Sort of article that should show up in the MSM but rarely does these days.
Excellent read, thank you.
My congratulations to Rodney Tiffen for this very, informative and sobering article on the insulation “issue”.
I wish that every Australian could read this, in order for them to understand, and learn just how badly Australians are served by the popular news media in this country! I will happily use Rodney’s material to defend the good intentions of the government’s program, which appears to have been lost in all of this!
Greg Ovens
Nice story, just missing some key facts – like that the federal government was advised by representatives of the fair trading agencies of all states that this was a disaster waiting to happen.
Try and paint it any colour you like, but this Titanic program started sinking as soon as it was launched.
Rodney – Great piece of forensic analysis! Thank you.
Hallelujah — someone has put a reasoned and researched argument into effect.
It should be essential reading to the commentariat who currently seem to masquerade as journalists.
It is just a shame the common sense commentaries such as this will not be seen by the general public.
Thanks for this article, although, like Kevin Herbert, I think you have been too quick to accept the arguments about the economic and environmental benefits of the program. The value of free insulation as a greenhouse gas reduction measure is far from settled. Actual vs theoretical benefits haven’t been properly evaluated and issues like “Comfort Creep”, poor performance due to workmanship or materials and net whole of life CO2 budgets have not been factored into any of the official claims of CO2 benefits. Like the previous Government’s “low emissions” light bulb giveaway, we are paying dearly for CO2 reductions through such programs.
Otherwise, you have “nailed” the mainstream media and Opposition criticisms of the program. In this world where nearly all delivery of government programs is outsourced, the private sector risk management model is itself a huge risk for politicians and bureaucracies – as is the ability of facile and ignorant analysis to excite the public.
This article is just plain wrong — it tries to defend the indefensible. As someone close to the people responsible for running the insulation scheme, I can assure you that everyone in the know admits it was an unmitigated disaster, and not just in political terms. Insiders blame the rushed and very flawed design of the policy — wiser heads in the public service saw red from the beginning, but were overruled by their political masters who wanted action fast.
Fact is, you can’t just blame unscrupulous private operators for all the dodgines that went on. Given public money is involved, it is the government’s responsibility to ensure compliance is maximised and all risks considered and mitigated. If this doesn’t happen, govt deserve to cop the blame. When government hands out the taxpayers money to the private sector, it is rarely done willy-nilly as it is a given that there are lot of people out there who will misuse the money through incompetence, or who will seek to defraud the government if they can. A well-designed program has mechanisms in place to weed out as many of these people as possible, or alternatively pick them up later through compliance action.
The insulation scheme by contrast just assumed all insulation installers would be perfectly qualified, with hearts of gold and no alterio motives whatsoever. Adequate checks and balances were not built in, because the priority was to shift vast sums of money out the door — which I guess was the point of the program, but if you take credit for this you also gotta take responsibility for the unintended consequences.
The key failure of this policy it seems to me is that the government encouraged small business people in the insulation business to expand on the basis of a pot of gold
When the thing looked a bit politically embarrasing Rudd couldn’t turn off the tap fast enough with the predictable result that hundreds of mostly young workers were laid off by their contractor employers with immediate damage to their Centrelink entitlements.
A more truthful headline would have been “Rudd backflip tosses hundreds out of work”
I’ll start by congratulating Prof Tiffen for a thoughtful and much-needed contribution to the public discourse on this issue.
It appears that the comments made by Kevin, Aubrey and ‘yellowsnow’ consist of three assertions:
(a) the cessation of the scheme has been detrimental to insulation manufacturing businesses;
(b) the environmental impact of the scheme may have been overestimated; and
(c) when the delivery of a service is privatised, the government has a responsibility to protect the public from the incompetence and/or bad faith of private operators.
Regarding (a), Prof Tiffen wholly acknowledges the artificially short-lived nature of Keynesian stimulus efforts, and notes that the home insulation program was no exception. To this I would add the notion that these businesses should bear some responsibility for their reliance on what they knew was a temporary government subsidy.
Regarding (b), it does appear that conflicting theories and models have been put forward (by Assoc Prof Terry Williamson of the University of Adelaide, for example, as well as DEWHR and the Total Environment Centre), and for this reason I agree that it is misleading for Prof Tiffen to state that ‘the benefits of home insulation have not been questioned’.
Regarding (c), this can only be seen as an argument for the socialisation of industry, or at least a vast increase in the quantity of industrial regulation, which I’m not sure accurately represents the interests of those criticising the government on this basis. Also, Prof Tiffen’s reference to privately-run immigration detention centres is particularly apt in light of the recent escapes from Villawood.
Terrific article!
For the critics – it cannot be denied that, proportionally, there were less fires than in previous years. “Under the program, the number of installations rose from 67,000 a year to 1.1 million; the number of fires rose from around eighty to 120.”
Did the rushed government programme save Australians from future roof fires that would have occurred if they installed insulation at their own pace?
Simple, unemotional article, attempting to put the Home Insulation Program into non headline grabbing report. Thank you for some background perspective in explaining the simple facts.
It’s a fact of life that there are risks and dangers in whatever we do. And most, yes most, of them occur at home or very near home e.g. car accidents.
Some very tragic lessons have been learnt and hopefully people will learn.
Coming from the construction industry,what happened to those four workers was inexcusable regardless of the so called achievements of the government. As the ultimate head of the food chain Peter Garrett is/was responsible as the employer for seeing that the correct systems and processes were put in place to ensure the safety of all those working under his program. This is basic OHS Law. He might not do it personally but he still takes the rap for it if it goes wrong as much as he gets the credit if it succeeds. Why did four boys have to die? Why was the program not halted after the first fatality and the systems and processes in use checked?, as is normal practice in industry on the case of a death. Who monitored the safety and qualifications of these workers? The professor is correct in saying the approx 50 persons die every year in the construction industry, however I can safely say that in no other part of the industry, would you have a death of a worker and the work just keeps on rolling on as if nothing had happened, using the same practices etc.
From a taxpayer standpoint, the whole home insulation program was probably the biggest and worst managed waste of taxpayer funds that has ever been perpetrated on this country in the guise of a program. The managers of this so called program in Canberra were nothing short of incompetent and ought be summarily dismissed quick smart and charged with offences under the various work cover acts. Lastly it is worth remembering that the need to spend money does not ever override the requirement to achieve value for money for the taxpayer, and that the Aussie economy was saved not by Rudd and co borrowing and spending our kids future, but by contracts for exports of resources that were already in place before the GFC.
good article Rodney. Just like to differ on the issue of accidents and daylight saving. While I understand that your message was about cause and effect or ‘apparent correlation does not mean causation’, subsequent studies have found patterns of accidents relating to changing daylight saving. Basically (from memory) there was a shift of accidents in the dark of the evening commute to the dark of the morning commute.
Another factor in the insulation deaths and fires, is that it exposed holes in the States and Territories regulatory mechanisms and a potential failure in Standards Australia in allowing Aluminium foil to be used in retrofits on top of the ceiling joists where contact with wiring is inevitable, underneath the rafters in gable roofs maybe….
Same with downlights – Australian Standards, State regulations, training and work standards of tradesman and auditing of potentially dangerous work is totally inadequate.
As a colleague on secondment from the US EPA said “In Australia, you don’t hesitate to legislate, but you don’t regulate… or or put resources into prosecutions
Thanks an excellent article. New Zealand experience also demonstrates a health benefit with a 2007 report finding that, “Insulating existing houses led to a significantly warmer, drier indoor environment and resulted in improved self rated health, self reported wheezing, days off school and work, and visits to general practitioners as well as a trend for fewer hospital admissions for respiratory conditions”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1808149/
The effects in terms of health (and reduced morbidity) are clear. When will this be reported by our fearless and inquiring press?
During the course of last year I read only one printed article approximately 5 months ago which gave a similar perspective on the HIP as the above. I was astonished to learn how many homes were insulated, how standards had improved and that “direct action” had been taken on climate change.
This illuminated a few issues.
1. the Rudd government is actually very poor at spin.
2. Our current media delight in using colourful political slander without a duty of care. This applies to even the most senior journalists. There is a willingness in the media to adopt politically designed phrases into the reporting without any acknowledgement of how the terms are colouring the reporting of the issue or how the arguments around it are being hijacked.
3. Never before have I witnessed so many obvious, clearly misleading and self serving destructive slogans being used unchallenged in political reporting and journalism.
4. Real lives are often at stake.
Thank you Rodney Tiffen
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