No one is responsible now

No one is responsible now. We have come to a new point in Australian politics today. Ministerial responsibility is gone and a new system of no one is responsible for mistakes has replaced it.

The scrapping of the home insulation program will come to haunt this Labor Government. It makes a complete mockery of Kevin Rudd’s claims to be a man who governs by following proper process. The whole sorry story is a text book example of what happens when public servants without experience in administering major contracts are told to spend money in a hurry.

Over in the Environment department there are a whole lot of serious and well-meaning men and women who are well qualified to identify the energy saving, and thus environmental, benefits that an insulation program brings. They have no qualifications at all to spend billions to achieve their aims.

As I have written before, this Government initiative, commendable in its intentions, attracted spivs aplenty because of a naive belief that the market would work it out. Just as bankers left unfettered throughout the world plundered billions so, too, in Australia have hundreds of unqualified smarties got their hands on millions for work they did sloppily or in many cases work they did not do at all.

The price has been paid by four relatively untrained workers — recruited to take part in the rort — who died in ceilings and by thousands of Australian home owners who now have at best insulation that does not insulate.

And no one is being held responsible!

Some idle speculation. I cannot believe that the heads of the Environment and Prime Minister’s departments did not alert their respective bosses to the contents of the report by Minter Ellison outlining the risks in the insulation scheme. That is just too “Yes Ministerish” to be believable. What I can believe is that the report was delivered to the respective ministerial offices where it raised such alarm that a decision was made to give a short verbal briefing on the contents along with the suggestion that the report not actually be read so innocence could be pleaded if things ever went wrong. Such, I fear, is the way of modern government.

Ignoring the good news. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. This Labor Government is going down the gurgler of public opinion because of that Peter Garrett fellow and a jolly good read it is making. At last we journalists in Canberra can report a real election race so how dare that Gary Morgan fellow try and say it isn’t so. Simply don’t report the finding released on Friday that his poll shows Labor has re-established its huge lead in public opinion. That’s how to handle that.

I mean, how dare he say this when the collective wisdom of the press gallery is that Tony Abbott is making up ground and is now in with an excellent chance of winning:

The latest Face-to-Face Morgan Poll conducted over the last two weekends, February 6/7 & 13/14, 2010 shows the ALP (57.5%, up 1% since the last Face-to-Face poll conducted on January 23/24 & 30/31, 2010) maintaining a strong two-party preferred lead over the L-NP (42.5%, down 1%).

The ALP primary vote rose 1% to 47%, well ahead of the L-NP (37%, down 1%), while looking at the minor parties shows support for the Greens (9%, up 0.5%), Family First (2%, up 0.5%) and Independents/ Others (5%, down 1%).

Give us Dennis Shanahan’s view on Newspoll any day. At least he knows how to make things interesting.

For those of you who enjoy being kill-joys, here is the Morgan verdict:

A warning sign. With a couple more interest rate rises being foreshadowed by the Reserve Bank governor, the release this morning by the Housing Industry Association of its housing affordability index should have the Government concerned. According to the association, housing affordability nose-dived at the end of 2009 due to “the perfect storm of higher house prices, increased interest rates, and the winding-down of the first home buyers’ boost.”

Yet another reason to punt on the Morgan poll correctly reflecting public opinion and scurrying off to a double-dissolution election.