Peter Garrett’s insulation program has dramatically increased standards in an industry where there were previously very few. And yet the barrage against him continues.

As I blogged yesterday, fossicking around the Australian Bureau of Statistics finds some interesting data on the number of homes fitted with insulation before and after Garrett ramped up the industry with his lucrative rebate.

Essentially, one scenario (with some assumptions on the cause of fire) sees 1 in 909 installs lead to fire before 2008. Under the Garrett insulation program, the rate is 1 in 11,828 — a much smaller rate of fires than what existed before the program.

Let us be clear: the insulation scheme was only shut down after the Minter Ellison document became a pivotal issue, suggesting that Garrett not only failed to read a document back in April 2009 that seemingly highlighted every problem — both real and imagined (but more on that later) — that has come to pass in the scheme, but that if he had read the Minter Ellison document and acted upon it, if he had followed the advice of Minter Ellison, homes would not have burned, people would not have died, the scheme would not have failed. It was definitive proof, so the media narrative went, that Garrett was a poster boy for ministerial incompetence writ large.

It was this Minter Ellison document and the plague-like hysterical misreporting of its contents that forced public opinion to run so strongly against Garrett (with his approval rating of 28%) and the government that they were forced to shut it down –- just as all governments shut down medium sized programs when public opinion gets beyond rational; witness the politicians superannuation scheme in 2004 and the Howard fuel excise indexation in 2001.

If the Minter Ellison document was reported accurately, the program would still be operational.

This scheme was shut down and the jobs of at least 5000 people and the immediate living standards of another 12-15,000 family members got sent down the toilet because journalists were incompetent. On their heads rests the economic consequences of these ostensibly low income, lowest skilled people getting sacked.

This Minter Ellison Risk Register was a report that, according to The Australian, “warned of an “extreme risk” of house fires, fraud and poor quality installations”. On top of these frightening risks, The Australian stated that, “Peter Garrett was kept in the dark by his department about warnings it received that the home insulation scheme should be delayed for three months because of “extreme risks”.”

The only problem here is that this – and I mean all of this – is complete and utter bullshit.