Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  In the latter stages of the rollout, four young installers lost their lives—one in New South Wales and three in Queensland—and the criticisms intensified. That young people involved in a government scheme had died was a tragedy that stopped my office in its tracks, and from the first death my bones felt heavy when I got out of bed each morning.

  In the New South Wales case, a young man had stupidly been allowed to go into a roof cavity in forty-degree heat with only a sports drink to relieve his thirst. Even now it’s hard to find words to describe how futile this death was, although it could hardly be said to be the government’s fault.

  In Queensland, three young men died when stapling insulation to ceiling joists with metal fasteners that came in contact with wiring in the roofs. In one instance, there was a pre-existing electrical fault in the ceiling. One of the men had undertaken the training program for installers and done over a hundred jobs, but had still used metal fasteners, which I’d banned months earlier, following advice that this measure would improve safety. In each of the Queensland cases, the employers were found to have ignored the scheme’s guidelines and a number were subsequently found guilty of negligence, and in one case of perjury, and fined. They’d clearly failed in their duty of care to their employees, but—understandably—for the families of the young men who’d died, none of this mattered.

  As the program was ramped up we devoted more time to monitoring progress, taking advice from the department and meeting regularly with the insulation industry, looking for ways to make the program as safe as possible. When that advice was presented, or on the occasions when I requested extra measures be considered, they were put in place immediately. Ultimately, they included nearly sixty measures designed to increase safety and reduce fraud: we banned the use of metal fasteners in order to prevent electric shocks; made the use of downlight covers compulsory; implemented a ‘name and shame’ register of installers who had breached the rules and been deregistered; established a national training scheme; and required a risk assessment of the job before putting people in ceilings to install the insulation.

  The speed of the rollout and the fact that occupational health and safety was a state responsibility—although only South Australia had specific regulations in place for insulation—meant the program relied on the companies and individuals involved to do the right thing. Most did, but some, including those involved in the fatalities, didn’t.

  By early February 2010, with the four fatalities uppermost in people’s minds, the program was under pressure and it was clear that something had to give—the question was what that ‘something’ would be. According to Opposition leader Tony Abbott, by then making a career out of overreach, I was in ‘electrocution denial’ and guilty of ‘industrial manslaughter’. As a man who had stated, in a 2002 address to the Queensland Industrial Relations Society (titled ‘In Praise of Bosses [and the jobs they bring]’, that ‘. . . workplace safety is a shared responsibility between employer and employee . . . [and] we should also be aware of the tendency to be wise after the event and seek scapegoats rather than solutions’, his hypocrisy was breathtaking.

  Abbott showed no restraint: the program was a disaster and I had blood on my hands, he thundered; accusations that hurt, especially when picked up by members of the public.

  Greg Hunt, Abbott’s environment spokesman, led the charge outside parliament by simply repeating that I should have somehow predicted every one of the program’s problems before they eventuated. This line was taken up with relish by the radio shock jocks whom Hunt fed on a regular basis. These bleaters seemed perfectly happy to ignore the reality that, whether or not there was a home-insulation program, any one of their listeners could install insulation in their own roofs without any kind of training or minimum requirements. Hunt claimed that both Rudd and myself had received ten direct warnings about the dangers in the scheme and that these had been ignored, and further claimed that Rudd had specifically ignored warnings that I’d sent him.

  He was wrong, as subsequent reviews, including the Abbott government’s royal commission into the scheme, would show. I’d written four letters to Rudd, detailing issues concerning the insulation scheme that he answered over time. (To my surprise, when I left parliament I received a card from Greg Hunt that said, ‘I regard you as one of the people with the highest integrity in the parliament and an outstandingly decent person.’) But by now anyone with a by-line, a blog or any other kind of bully pulpit was slavering to have a go. The pattern was set: a groundless accusation from the Opposition or a mischievous claim from an unnamed member of the public was made, and reported breathlessly as fact, without any attempt to examine the truth of the allegation and what, if any, actions had been taken by the government as a consequence. The final ignominy came when I was secretly filmed early one morning in my tracksuit pants letting Woody, the family dog, out for a pee. The Daily Telegraph photographer hiding behind a row of parked cars chose his moment well—they aren’t called snappers for nothing—and the front page screamed loser.

  Much of the media, including senior ABC journalists like Chris Uhlmann, swallowed it hook, line and sinker. After a barrage of headlines from News Limited papers, and already convinced that all politicians were liars, most journalists had come to the view that, if not guilty, I was at least culpable. The mud would stick for some time to come.

  The press gallery hacks were so convinced of my imminent demise that a press conference to report on the scheme, convened in the Blue Room, in the ministerial wing of Parliament House just prior to question time, was a full house. The journalists turned up expecting my resignation and more than one let my media adviser know how disappointed they were when it didn’t come, such was the pack’s blood lust.

  Desperate for the ultimate prize in political combat—a minister’s scalp—the Coalition now applied what is euphemistically described as the blowtorch, and the attack in parliament escalated. I faced question after question, and censure motions, considered one of the most severe mechanisms for criticising a government, rained down.

  Yet in the midst of the fury I was reasonably calm, desperately sorry for what had happened, but certain that I’d done everything I could to deliver the government program and to make it as safe as possible in the circumstances.

  Midway through Wednesday of the second week of haranguing, having failed to come up with any new angles, the attack on me faltered and the Opposition started aiming its sights on the prime minister. We’d been well prepared, including having a relay team running material into the house when needed, and the questions to me suddenly stopped.

  A few old hands passed down notes saying, ‘Well done, you’re through the worst of it.’ As it turned out, I wasn’t.

  We still had Senate estimates to contend with. While one of the most useful exercises in the parliament, where the government can be questioned in detail on the budget and any specific programs, it is also an opportunity for political point-scoring around contentious issues. In the preceding fortnight, not confident that all the available information about the program had been funnelled up through the bureaucracy, we did a document dump, checking every email and letter, to make sure we knew what had been communicated to my office on each day since the program started. All my senior staff and advisers (Ben Pratt, Peter Wright, Matt Levey, David Blumenthal, Kate Pasterfield, Andy Palfreyman and Jack Smith) were pulled off their existing duties and worked through the night going through the thousands of emails and documents that had come from the department.

  Satisfied that we had a robust case and a clear understanding of what advice had come to us and when, I then asked Robyn Kruk, secretary of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, whether the various measures that had been put in place to address safety could guarantee there wouldn’t be further injuries. Robyn had been recruited from New South Wales and was an able, experienced bureaucrat. But she too had been let down by inexperienced officials struggling to manage the volume of insulation activity and not
reporting up to her sufficiently. Her advice was clear: she couldn’t guarantee the program didn’t still contain significant risks. Indeed, how could she?

  The estimates sessions hadn’t uncovered any additional glitches, but I’d requested written advice to confirm Kruk’s assessment that there could still be problems lurking, and material was prepared for a decision to be taken by the special budget committee of cabinet that oversaw the program. During this period, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Treasury were sending signals that the program should be kept open. Emissaries from Rudd’s office called to discuss the issue but eventually his deputy chief of staff, David Fredericks, a straight shooter whom I respected, agreed that the position we’d arrived at, to suspend the program, should come before the committee as soon as possible, and a meeting was scheduled for Wednesday, 17 February 2010.

  I had an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right when I showed up in the cabinet suite to find Terry Moran, the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, hovering grim-faced in the corridor. There was a problem, Fredericks told me: we didn’t have agreement.

  I assumed ‘we’ could only mean the officials from what is called the central agencies—Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Finance—or Rudd, who was absent. I still went into the meeting determined to press for a suspension.

  As Fredericks had indicated, the committee didn’t support me. There was discussion about the impact on businesses and jobs, and whether some hybrid of the scheme could continue. Instead of reaching a decision, they sought additional advice about the state of the program. Despite Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, assuring me, ‘We’re not going to hang you out to dry,’ this was the kind of manoeuvre that could buy time for an exit strategy to be decided—or it could create space to allow a scapegoat to be identified, either departmental or political. Whichever way it played, and given how feeble support from the prime minister’s office had been up to that time, I had a strong suspicion that I was being set up for a fall. Either that, or the bureaucrats involved were trying to work out how to cover their backsides.

  I pressed into the gale of negativity, urging that the matter be resolved as soon as possible, and a further meeting was scheduled for two days later.

  In the interim we continued our arguments that the program needed to cease, including through Robyn Kruk speaking directly to Moran.

  Despite the fact that the government was now under intense pressure, with calls for my resignation growing louder, when the meeting reconvened I was aghast to find the prime minister’s office and the treasurer still arguing against closure. Andrew Charlton, a young economist from Rudd’s office, was the most emphatic. Which rock had he been sleeping under?, I wondered, as he and others argued against stopping the rollout, and sought to argue the issue on the grounds of the effect on insulation businesses and the economy as a whole.

  Notwithstanding this eleventh-hour stalling, the sound of the enemy cavalry galloping up Capital Hill and into our offices was by now so deafening it couldn’t be ignored, so eventually realpolitik prevailed and it was agreed to suspend the program.

  Rudd had chaired the meeting but there’d been so much toing and froing it ran behind time. The announcement dribbled out late on Friday evening and immediately added impetus to the Opposition’s case.

  Back in parliament the following week, they renewed their attack on Rudd—who, incidentally, was also seeing his personal approval ratings slide. At one stage, without warning, he headed out of his office solo to confront a small anti-government demonstration, including some angry installers, at the front of parliament. Notebook in hand, he took details from the crowd, promising to look into their complaints and fix their problems, saying, ‘I get it, we get it.’

  That night these comments were highlighted unfavourably on some evening news broadcasts and the next evening, when Rudd appeared on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, he was belittled for this lapse by the interviewer, Kerry O’Brien.

  Both Rudd’s and my offices had agreed on the government’s response, but live on air Rudd left the door open for an additional comeback, though, confusingly, he remained vague about what that might mean. It was a bizarre performance that hinted at extra steps that could be taken, presumably actions that included me.

  I knew then that, whatever else happened, my long-term political career was grounded. I also knew that the leader of the country, and the only boss I’d ever worked under, had completely lost the plot, but that didn’t really help.

  When pressed about my position, Rudd had said, ‘I stand by the minister as I did last week, as I’ll do next week.’ This was a sentiment he also expressed in the regular Caucus meeting, which was greeted by applause from Labor members.

  By the next week I was dead meat. Rudd’s office had called on the Thursday when parliament broke to say he wanted to see me in Sydney the following day.

  On Friday, 26 February, I flew to Sydney with Kate Pasterfield and Ben Pratt. There I met with Rudd and Jordan in the Commonwealth Offices in Bridge Street to be told that ‘once the smoke has cleared’, there would be additional roles pre-election—as if. And, to add insult to injury, they suggested that, after the election, I would be given more responsibilities around renewable energy, which all and sundry knew was one of my prime obsessions. For now, though, some parts of the portfolio would be handed over to others. It was a demotion, notwithstanding Rudd telling me it was about ‘perceptions’, not performance. An hour and a half later he gave a press conference announcing the decision, during which he omitted saying he had any confidence in me as a minister.

  Of course Rudd didn’t need to dump me, and you would like to think a leader with any sense of loyalty or spine, like P.J. Keating, wouldn’t have. Whatever damage the government had suffered, the matter had run its course. And in yet another piece of irony, the weekly polls showed the government increasing its low standing by one percentage point.

  A few months before, an article had appeared in The Daily Telegraph detailing the beginnings of Rudd’s loss of personal popularity, particularly among western Sydney voters who, because of the large numbers of seats, can determine an election. In fact, Rudd’s artificially high figures were simply returning to normal territory, but for someone who craved public appreciation and had designed his politics around playing to public perceptions, this trend was poison.

  Also reported were pre-Christmas conversations canvassing my ministerial position, between Rudd and numbers man Senator Mark Arbib, a leader of the New South Wales right faction who’d recently come into the senate. Rudd owed his position to Arbib, who had been placed in charge of the whole of the stimulus package but took little interest in its problems. I’d ignored the rumours that were generated by the reporting of the Arbib/Rudd conversations, but it was clear the sharks were circling, even if they hadn’t quite figured out what to do.

  In the wash-up of the scheme’s closure, respected former head of the defence department Allan Hawke was commissioned to review the insulation program and found my responses were ‘appropriate and timely’. The auditor-general subsequently stated that ‘the former minister received incomplete, inaccurate and untimely briefings’ and that bureaucrats had withheld information from my office, as I was by now well aware.

  The fact was that the home-insulation scheme had become one of the symbols of the government’s alleged failings. The narrative was so strongly repeated it became folklore, accepted by people within the Labor Party as well as outside it. Only a handful of journalists, like Radio National’s Fran Kelly and The Australian’s Peter van Onselen, Laura Tingle from the Financial Review, Barry Cassidy from ABC’s Insiders and the Sky News team of David Speers and Kieran Gilbert, continued to report events in dispassionate terms. The ABC’s Virginia Trioli was among the first to call out publicly what had become increasingly clear when she asked in the midst of an interview about whaling: ‘You’ve ultimately then been made the fall guy, haven’t you, for the fact that you properly informed your pri
me minister?’

  Only a rare few members of the fourth estate, including Bernard Keane and Alan Austin from Crikey and Jack Waterford from The Canberra Times, chose to step back and analyse the program in detail. In an article published on 3 September 2014 (‘Pink batts commission hands Abbott four explosive problems’), Austin came to the view that the government’s achievement in avoiding recession had been virtually ignored, as had the fact that insulation had been installed in nearly a million homes at a greatly improved safety rate. In fact, contrary to the water-cooler chatter, the program had saved young Australians from the unemployment queues and the misery that accompany a recession, and, drawing on CSIRO research, it was clear that building and installing insulation was now safer than before the scheme began. Responsibility for the program’s failures lay primarily with the central agencies—Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Finance—that designed and supervised the scheme. These observations were obscured by Tony Abbott’s need for a political scalp, and the press gallery’s appetite for controversy.

  The problems the scheme was facing fed into a broader narrative of government dysfunction that was impossible to shake. It is the case that the program was rushed, but that was necessary; if it hadn’t been done quickly, it wouldn’t have achieved its economic purpose. But it did mean mistakes were made. It was too open to shonks, and the environment department struggled to administer it in such a way as to reduce risk even further.