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Monday, 4 July 2011
Page: 7478

Ms O'DWYER (Higgins) (13:25): I think it is very revealing that neither the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency nor the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency have decided to front up today to justify and explain the Home Insulation Program and their lack of accountability for this program. I listened very carefully to the speeches delivered by the member for Throsby and, before him, the member for Chifley. There was a common thread in those speeches. The member for Chifley in particular talked about how this motion was a stunt, how it was petty to bring it forward and how it was frivolous. This is an absolutely outrageous thing for the government to say. We know that the government does not like to be held to account, particularly for programs that it has designed and implemented.

What this motion asks for today is a measure of accountability for the program that this government has brought into effect. There can be no better way of looking at it than looking at the examples that exist in our electorates. I will talk specifically of an example in my electorate of Higgins involving Ms Felicity Kiddle. She is an elderly resident who was approached by an insulation installer who knocked on her door and told her about the government's offer. The installer assured her that they were registered with the government and that there would not be any problem with installing insulation. They installed that insulation on 9 December but only installed a fraction of the insulation required by simply laying it over the manhole in her ceiling to make it appear as though the entire installation had been covered. The company received the full payment from the government of $1,200. It was only later that Ms Kiddle discovered this fraud. It was not until a professional plumber entered her roof for an unrelated matter that the insulation job was found to be incomplete.

Ms Kiddle was very concerned about this. She was concerned not only about the potential safety implications of a job that was not properly done but for the Australian taxpayer—that a bill had been paid for a job that was not properly completed. She did what any right-thinking constituent would do and contacted the hotline. The response that she got from this hotline was that she could fill in a form from Consumer Affairs Victoria if she was not satisfied with the work and if she wanted an inspection done she could pay for that herself. This belies a very important fact. We are not simply talking about not being happy with a job that had been done. It is much more serious than that. It is that the job itself had not been done, which is fraud. It was a phantom job, and yet it was paid for by the Australian taxpayer.

I did what any responsible member of parliament would do and I wrote to the minister. I explained this fact to the minister but I have not received one more piece of information about what the government has done to try and rectify this fraud. It is always left in the hands of the constituent to solve a problem of the government's creation. It is simply not good enough. It is not good enough that the government refuses to be held to account for a problem that it has created. It is not just this issue that it refuses to be held to account for but, more broadly, issues to do with the safety inspection scheme itself. I have another constituent who suffered the very traumatic experience of having part of his ceiling collapse. It collapsed one night at one o'clock in the morning. He had a safety inspection performed. That safety inspection said that there was no fault in the structural integrity of the ceiling. But when the evidence came back to us from the parliamentary secretary, he simply referred to the electrical safety aspect of the program. So it is not clear that the safety inspection programs that are being conducted are going to the core issues that have been raised by the residents, whether they be in relation to fraud or to the structural integrity of the job that has been done.

This program has cost the Australian taxpayer over $1.7 billion in addition to destroying homes and, unfortunately, destroying four young lives. The government should be held to account. It is not improper for us to hold the government to account. We will continue to do this.