Garrett the fall guy in Rudd's roofing fiasco

ENVIRONMENT Minister Peter Garrett has become a scapegoat of the Prime Minister and his Assisting Minister for Government Service Delivery, Mark Arbib. They are the two people who should be hauled over the coals for their (mis)handling of the botched home roof insulation scheme.

The review of the program's administration, conducted by retired senior public servant Allan Hawke and released during the week, makes clear findings that Garrett's responses to the problems with the program were appropriate and timely.

In all the reporting of the review and its contents, praise for the minister's conduct has largely gone unnoticed. Garrett was handed a program he had raised serious concerns about to his Prime Minister for the rushed nature of its implementation.

He was not alone. I have been told by a very senior Labor source that Julia Gillard did the same at the special-purpose budget committee, the inner sanctum of the government that rules on which programs get the green light and which don't. We may never know for sure just how strident Garrett and Gillard were in raising their concerns. Garrett has stayed silent on what he may or may not have discussed with the Prime Minister, something that we can only hope changes if Kevin Rudd chooses to dump him from the ministry after the next election.

There is no doubt that the roof insulation scheme was problematic. It directly led to at least one of four deaths (the other three being a mixture of poor occupational health and safety practices and an outright violation of the scheme's standards). But we shouldn't forget the first death was an electrocution from metal staples used on foil roof insulation. Securing insulation with metal staples is a practice in operation since the 1950s.

Hawke's review points to doubts over the value to the environment of some of the installing of insulation, partly because of shoddy workmanship, partly because of cheap import substitutes being used in the rush to get the materials into people's roofs.

Hawke also points out that Garrett's department was not suited to rolling out such a scheme. Government departments rarely are, but the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is particularly void of experience handling mass rollouts of government programs.

Garrett knew this and again warned others about the risks. His department placated his concerns each time he raised them, and when Garrett and his department jointly warned the Office of the Co-ordinator-General about concerns attached to the scheme, no action was taken to alleviate the pressure. Garrett's department not only didn't have the experience to handle the rushed roll out, it didn't have the capacity to do so at the same time as managing the evolving set of problems that ensued. That is why the OCG, responsible for oversight of all the government's $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan (which includes the Building the Education Revolution), needed to do more.

Hawke in his review is scathing about the failure of the OCG to get involved: "Given the reach of the program into so many Australian homes, it demanded much more and continuous attention from the Office of the Co-ordinator-General than it in fact received."

That office is located in none other than Rudd's own department, with Arbib assigned direct responsibility for watching over its operations. We may never know exactly how directly involved Arbib or the micro-managing Prime Minister actually were in the OCG's decision not to get involved.

However, the most serious area to which people's attention should be drawn is the rush to get the program up and running in the wake of the global financial crisis. It was an economic, not environmental, call to arms to employ low-skilled people considered to be most at risk from the financial meltdown. In other words, it was not Garrett's decision to rush the program into operation; it was Rudd's (and perhaps Wayne Swan's).

Garrett had been an advocate of roof insulation for some time, keen to ramp up the industry for its obvious environmental benefits. Malcolm Turnbull, opposition leader at the time, was also keen to see the industry grow for the same reasons.

But it was Rudd and his economic inner circle who forced Garrett to rush out the scheme against his better judgment, and to everyone's surprise the take-up by consumers was double the government's projections, putting enormous stress on the compliance and training procedures on which Garrett had insisted.

Just as John Howard was surprised by the capacity of employers to rort his WorkChoices legislation when he lowered the bar on employment conditions, Garrett and the government were surprised by the sizeable entry of shonky operators into the roof insulation business when the government rebate kicked in.

When reporting of the four deaths saw Garrett come under pressure to resign, Rudd initially came to his defence, describing him as a first-class minister, before cutting his portfolio responsibilities and making him the scapegoat for the scheme's failure. Perhaps Garrett wasn't a first-class minister, given some of the findings in the Hawke review, but he certainly wasn't the dud Tony Abbott tried to claim he was when constantly calling for his head.

Garrett has had to live with the fact he is a tall poppy in a political environment that likes to cut down such species. It is the challenge newcomers from outside the closed world of political insiders often face.

But the way Garrett has been portrayed as the weak link in the roof insulation debacle is not only unfair, it is plain wrong. The last point to consider is the criticism he faced for not showing enough emotion when confronted with questions about the four deaths and the more than 100 house fires. At first I thought the same thing.

However, a rarely noticed detail that explains Garrett's bureaucratic facade at press conferences and in question time is that his mother died in a house fire when he was young. It wasn't that Garrett didn't have empathy for the victims of the roof insulation scheme; it was that he had too much empathy but didn't want to use his personal circumstances to reach out to those damaged by the failures of the scheme.