Labor’s home insulation scheme leaves a sorry tale of destruction and a million homeowners still in the dark.
Four installers working on the program died, around 200 house fires are known to have occurred, many businesses have been destroyed, significant numbers of jobs lost and approaching $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds have been wasted.
Few government programs have extracted such a high price from all parts of the Australian community.
Data from homes inspected to date show that 24 per cent of homes have defective insulation or installations that don’t meet building code standards.
Any way you look at this program it has been an unmitigated disaster.
A million homes have not been inspected. Labor must state what the expected defect rate in these homes is. And they must outline a plan to rectify defects in these homes.
What are the figures for the one million missing homes? Why must these homeowners live with uncertainty? How will their issues be fixed?
By announcing an end to inspections the Government is ensuring the true cost of this program and exact number of homes with problems will never be known.
This program was conceived in scandal, executed in scandal and is now being covered up in scandal.
Given the terrible toll Labor has extracted installing home insulation it’s little wonder Australians are so worried about what damage they will do implementing a carbon tax.