Young men died for a deadline in Batts scheme

THE home insulation scheme was deeply flawed from the start.

Kevin and Christine Fuller, parents of Matthew Fuller who died installing insulation, arr

FROM the beginning, the sulfurous whiff of politics has hung over the royal commission re-examining the Rudd government’s Home Insulation Program. The inquiry was branded a witch-hunt, a breach of convention and, yes, it did look as if Tony Abbott were dancing on Labor’s election grave.

But as it nears the end of its public sittings, the inquiry is showing every sign of having been a worthwhile exercise. For the first time, the families of the four young men who died while installing roofing batts and foil under the make-work program in 2009-10 have been given an understanding of what was going on behind the scenes in Canberra, as public servants scrambled to meet desperately tight deadlines to set up the HIP and roll it out.

Those at the apex of decision-making, Kevin Rudd and then ministers Peter Garrett, Mark Arbib and Greg Combet, have been examined and cross-examined under oath, something that no inquest or previous inquiry into the deaths has been able to do.

And perhaps we have edged closer to answers to the tantalising questions that lay at the heart of this deadly bungle: Was the scheme a deathtrap because it was rushed into existence? Were safety warnings ignored for political expediency? Could three lives have been saved had it been suspended or shut down after the first death, that of 25-year-old Queenslander Matthew Fuller on October 14, 2009?

“From our collective experience of this program, aided by the inquiries — six or seven prior to this — and by the deliberations of the commissioner, we shall learn about what best improves these circumstances into the future,” Rudd testified on Thursday, galvanising the proceedings by the presence of a former prime minister on the witness stand.

“I say, again, if these were my kids, I would feel exactly the same way, wanting to know what the answers were and how do you prevent it happening again.”

Commissioner Ian Hanger QC has until June 30 to finalise his report. When public hearings began, in mid-March, he was quick to say that the $20 million inquiry would not traverse old ground or settle scores, political or otherwise. “This isn’t a trial. It’s an inquiry designed to get to the heart of some very troubling matters,” he declared.

An industrial relations specialist, Hanger knows his way around the political minefield. In 1987, he chaired an inquiry in Queensland into labour laws. His comparatively moderate report hardly delivered what the hardline state National Party government would have wanted: cover to go after the unions. Instead, the inquiry backed the roles of trade unions and the industrial arbitration system.

There is hope Hanger’s inquiry into the HIP — for which the families of the victims lobbied tirelessly — will be definitive. It certainly has had unprecedented access to information.

Abbott overturned a century-long precedent on cabinet confidentiality by handing over secret documents to the commission. IT specialists retrieved tens of thousands of deleted emails between top bureaucrats and ministers on the insulation scheme. Cabinet discussions and decisions were laid bare.

For all that, there was no smoking gun. Speculation that one or more of five letters written by environment minister Peter Garrett to Rudd during the HIP’s troubled life had urged the prime minister to shut it down proved to be unfounded.

Rudd was adamant that he would have done so had he known of the safety issues earlier; he pointed to the public servants, saying the information never went up the line to him or cabinet.

Counsel assisting the commission, Keith Wilson QC, put to ex-senator Arbib that the HIP was fundamentally flawed.

The NSW Right powerbroker had been responsible for overseeing the Rudd government’s $42 billion stimulus plan to support the economy at the height of the global financial crisis, including the scheme to retrofit 2.7 million homes with insulation and create 9800 jobs. Wilson’s proposition was that the government had sought to inject a vast sum of money into an industry it did not properly understand, on a timescale that was unrealistic, without adequate precautions such as mandatory training, all of which was administered by a department under Garrett that had no experience in delivering such a program.

The “inevitable consequence’’ was that it would “destroy the very industry that the money was being targeted at”. Arbib replied: “In hindsight, yes.”

Under-the-pump bureaucrats, rushing to meet the deadline, were explicitly and repeatedly warned about safety risks, the inquiry heard. As early as February 18, 2009 — two weeks after Rudd announced the batts program — insulation ind­ustry figures were alerting envir­onment department bureau­crats, and officials from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to the electrocution of three installers under a similar New Zealand insulation policy. And in April that year, industry experts told a government-organised technical advisory group there was the “high likelihood of catastrophic consequence (death or serious injury)” under the HIP.

Those warnings were either not passed high enough up the chain (none reached ministerial or prime ministerial level), or the safeguards that could have been put in place by those bureaucrats — mandatory training for installers; close supervision; administration of the HIP by the states; a stringent audit and compliance regime; a five-year, rather than a two-year, rollout; an early ban on foil — were dismissed, abandoned or not considered before the scheme became fully operational on July 1, 2009.

Measures that should have worked, such as commissioning Minter Ellison to prepare a risk assessment in March 2009, didn’t. The document, for which Minter’s Margaret Coaldrake was paid nearly $30,000 for less than a fortnight’s work, didn’t regard safety to installers as a risk to the commonwealth, so made no mention of it.

In his evidence, Rudd said he was preoccupied with keeping Australia out of recession as the GFC took hold in 2008-09. The “abyss’’ yawned dark and deep if the economy faltered and unemployment spiked to a projected 9 per cent, potentially costing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

But Rudd insisted he didn’t set the start date for the HIP and it would have been abandoned had a public servant or minister raised safety concerns. Like Garrett and Arbib, Rudd sought to distance himself from the running and supervision of the scheme. The idea had come from the public service, he said, and so had the timetable. Until the very end, in February 2010, cabinet ministers were being advised that it had a “green light’’ to proceed under one of the monitoring mechanisms overseen by bureaucrats.

The officials told a different story: several witnesses from the public service said they believed the July start had been set from “on high”, by the prime minister or someone working for him in his office or the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Evidence was presented that the substantive part of the HIP was hurriedly drafted at the request of Rudd’s ministerial staff by a handful of public servants in less than week in January 2009. This was only days before the all-powerful Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee — Rudd’s kitchen cabinet with then deputy PM Julia Gillard, treasurer Wayne Swan and finance minister Lindsay Tanner — signed off on it on January 28, 2009.

Either way, most of the bur­eaucrats who testified told of working under intense pressure, around-the-clock to meet the deadline.

Aaron Hughes, a senior Environment Department public servant, agreed with Hanger that a “frank and fearless” bureaucrat should have stepped up and given advice to his political masters that the program could not be safely rolled out on the required schedule.

“The culture of the Environment Department at that time was ‘we can do this’,” Hughes told the commission.

It wasn’t just lives that were lost. Some 224 home fires broke out, compounding the misery caused by the HIP. Could that have been averted if the public service were given more time to carefully draft a more considered, risk-averse scheme? That question will be at the forefront of Hanger’s mind.