suck on this one darwin/hbs the leftard lover


Quote:



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/top-bureaucrat-robyn-kruk-defends-insul...

tell that to the 4 families who are still grieving,  the ex-owners of 90 burnt houses or the owners of insulation businesses who are now broke.


you defense of your beloved leftards is a disgrace, very krudd like

Sprintcyclist wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2010 at 3:31pm:


Garrett is the minister of a dept who is responsible for implementing programs, he doesn't go out and do the dodgy insulation himself, that is left to small business
Would you prefer we live in a country like the former Soviet Union, where there was no small business and everything could be blamed on the government?
The question you should be asking is "how does Barnaby's bitch sleep? he was a part of a government responsible for killing thousands of innocent women and children after invading a sovereign nation. Abbott does have blood on his hands, lots of it,and his government CAN be held totally responsible for their actions of invasion.

Its ok for Johnny Howard to send troops to Iraq though, how well thought out was that, did he resign, of course not, how many dead, did Turnbull resign with ute gate, of course not. Garret should stay and the boss of these installers should be held responsible.

I will ask you this Sprint, if you didnt know how to install insulation, would you just try or take some training, I know I would. Once again people are shifting the blame. The shonks will escape any punishment and I will just add this rascist attack  , they were Indians who did ours and they didnt have a clue, a proper tradesman came a few days later to fix it.

pope urban 2 wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2010 at 4:05pm:

Would what? Try or take some training?

Insulation fire risk was worse before rebate

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/insulation-fire-risk-was-worse-before-rebate-20100303-pivv.html

Peter Garrett's home insulation program was a debacle involving four deaths and 94 house fires, and proved his incompetence as a minister. At least, that's the story gaining the status of official political history, which Peter Costello drew on to attack the Rudd government's plans for public hospitals.

Costello recalls his successful opposition to Environment Department plans to insulate houses ''in the dying days of the Howard government … In those days, home insulation was dressed up as climate-change policy.'' You can see where he's coming from, and why from day one the Coalition ridiculed the ''pink batts'' stimulus measure.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott also says this ''disaster'' shows federal bureaucrats can't be trusted to run hospitals. But where is the evidence for this - at least before the program was shut down to ease the government's political pain? And when did the Coalition start to believe so fervently in ''nanny state'' regulation of business?

If the insulation program represents a disaster, this is indeed a lucky country. Roof or ceiling insulation cuts household energy use by up to 45 per cent. As the department told a Senate committee hearing, the program has a lasting legacy. More than 1 million households save up to $200 a year, with cuts in energy use equal to the output of a large power station, thereby avoiding the need for multibillion-dollar investments in generation and cumulatively cutting greenhouse emissions by 35 million tonnes by 2020. Not that this counts for anything with Costello.

Garrett supposedly failed to act on detailed warnings. The much-touted Risk Register and Management Plan - a document prepared in less than a week by Minter Ellison for the princely fee of $28,985 - in fact details and approves of many actions already taken by April 9 in response to 19 specific risk assessments.

Contrary to many media reports, it did not warn of unacceptable risks of workplace deaths, accidents and fires.

The register did identify a safety risk from house fires and damage. While the initial risk in category 4, installation quality and compliance, was assessed as extreme, the register assessed the effectiveness of mitigating actions as strong and downgraded the residual risk to an acceptable level. It approvingly listed 10 actions being taken on regulation and training.

In only three categories, none to do with safety or the quality of installation and insulation products, did the register warn of continuing extreme risks - despite an ''adequate'' government response in two instances.

These areas were also the only context in which a three-month program delay was proposed. It had nothing to do with safety risks. The three categories were: procurement/licensing, with risks of ''delays or total non-delivery'' and increased costs, leading to ''substantial political fallout''; time, with tight deadlines creating a risk of poor control and communication leading to non-delivery; and political, with risks including loss of goodwill, major loss in outcomes and early termination. Well, they got the last one right.

Ironically, that cannot be said of the four lowest-risk assessments, which included warnings about ''excessive media attention on non-compliance'', reduced installation quality, profiteering and loss of public confidence in the programs, which cause major political fallout and early termination. So much for the report that tipped the balance against Garrett.

So, nearly 12 months on, what did the program deliver? Surprisingly, it appears to have made insulation installation safer (thank you to blogsite Pollytics.com for detailing this and examples of misreporting).

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that 61 per cent of dwellings, almost 3.2 million, had insulation in 2008, with 98 per cent of these having roof or ceiling insulation.

Officials in Garrett's department told a Senate committee hearing that the pre-program rate of installations was 65,000 to 70,000 a year, with 80 to 85 insulation-related fires a year. Roughly 30 per cent were linked to new installations, on industry estimates. The program insulated more than 1.1 million homes. If 94 fires have been linked to this,

the implication is that the fire risk was roughly four times lower than before, even as the number of installations rose 15-fold

.

As for the four deaths of installers, one of them through heat exhaustion and another using foil insulation that Garrett had barred from the program months earlier, they are subject to coronial inquiries. The fact is, however, that the program introduced the first national training program for installers. Remember, this is a field in which foolhardy householders have a long DIY tradition and the insulation industry had been largely unregulated. Where was the concern about safety then?

If the program has proved anything, it is that Australia abounds with shonky businesses, ''she'll be right'' tradesmen, hypocritical politicians who habitually sacrifice workplace safety on the altar of business-friendly policy, and careless, pack-hunting journalists. That, I'm afraid, is not much of a revelation at all.