Labor face disaster if........

[Jovial Monk]

The mental world some people live in!

The purpose and spend of the RRT and CT have all been announced, but in conspiracy world this is going into Consol. Revenue and that is it. The NBN has blown out when hardly any money has actually been spent and all that has actually happened is construction tenders that are too high have been rejected.

Here is a hint: when the NBN is up and running people will have access to video on demand from many sources. That is a threat to Foxtel’s revenue flow, especially from sports, and that is why the Oz attacks the NBN.

[harry climber]

You can't blame the gov't when that crap happens, it's the contractors..

Actually you can, as it is the government that has created the scenario.
Part of any governmental policy is to ensure that they have checks and controls - the government failed to have these implemented due to their hasty pursuit of throwing money at "any quote" rather than accurate or realistic quotes.

[Leftwinger]

The insulation programme and the BER were subject to what were probably the most extrordinary media beat ups I have ever witnessed. It demonstrated how very ordinary, unremarkable events can be turned into a thrilling, heart-pounding national media circus by reporting the facts but deliberately leaving out the context necessary to properly understand those facts. While you would never minimise the tradgedy of four deaths and the fire damage to perhaps a couple of hundred properties, when we calmly stand back and consider that 1.2 million individual jobs were done under the programme we realise that portraying it as a national disaster of epic proportions is very exaggerated.

Similarly with the BER - I'm in a position to have personally inspected a number of these constructions and I'm yet to see a bad one. I've also spoken to someone who has inspected large numbers of them across an entire region and they haven't seen a bad one either. But when you plaster the headlines with stories of shonks and rip off merchants, while "accidently" neglecting to mention that this is not representative of the vast majority, you can embed the meme in the public's thinking that it was a massively expensive catastrophe.

To that end, the senseless braying of the media pack wasn't that senseless after all - they used mass hysteria to sell rather a lot of news.

[harry climber]

The insulation program was yet another disasterous program and once again Gillard failed to have the checks and controls, which is part of the government's duty, and by the government's incompetence this resulted in deaths.

[Leftwinger]

Seven or eight times as many Australians are killed each year in pushbike accidents than died under the one year long insulation programme.

If insulation is dangerous, then surely pushbikes must be deadly? We should ban them immediately and then seek the transport minister's head on a plate for having allocated the money to build the roads on which the cyclists died. But of course, we don't get that far before common sense prevails and we think "hang on - thirty people were killed, but weren't there millions of trips made on pushbikes?"

We should certainly investigate why the riders died to see if anything can be done to make it safer but we don't wave our arms and scream hysterically from the rooftops for the banning of these machines of death. Sadly, with the mass media peddling mass hysteria, we're not able to apply the same logic the the insulation programme and the BER.

[harry climber]

Governments have a duty of care to be observed with their policies. The ALP have failed in this regard with their deadly insulation policy when "cowboys" were allowed to install the insulation.
Will the government have learnt from this incompetence for the NBN implementation or will they allow for unlicenced contractors "cowboys" to install simply because they maybe a lot cheaper so then the NBN budget won't be (another) financial disaster.

[Leftwinger]

Actually, prior to the programme, no nationally accredited training programmes for installing ceiling insulation existed. Different states had different arrangements. The programme tightened the requirements for installing insulation progressively.

As could be expected, the rate of serious injury, death and property damage per intallation fell under the programme, especially the rate of insulation-linked housefires, which fell quite dramatically.

But as we have already seen, context is everything. The public were never informed that what they were seeing was not a huge and terrifying jump in the rate of incidents in the insulation industry but rather, a huge jump in the rate at which insulation jobs were being done - more than 15 times that of a normal year. The rate of serious incidents was actually lower than before but you had to look back a decade and a half to see that. Had this fact been made clear to us, we would have been able to make a more informed judgement and disregard the mass hysteria peddled by the MSM.

Too late - the average punter now "knows" that the programme was a deadly disaster that burned down houses as far as the eye can see and fried little old ladies in their beds everywhere. The government successfully prevented the collapse of the building industry and made it safer, but at the cost of a lot of political skin. Funny how things turn out sometimes. The MSM certainly have a lot to answer for.

[harry climber]

It is a sad state of affairs when people accept that deaths that should have been avoided become acceptable under the disguise of improving the industry.
No deaths should have eventuated and they only did due to the incompetence from the ALP.
The four families are hardly impressed with the suggestion that the building industry survived, in fact no person would be impressed with such a suggestion. Lives are far more important to that of jobs or an industry.

[Viking King.]

The insulation program was yet another disasterous program and once again Gillard failed to have the checks and controls, which is part of the government's duty, and by the government's incompetence this resulted in deaths.

Bad form thinking,
Example;
You harry and partner talk about building a new room at the back of the house,
you call a builder and agree to the work and quote, the job is started and completed, you pay the bill,
two months later a wall falls off the new room.
Who do you blame?
The contractor who did the work?
Yourself for thinking up the idea to have the room put on?

I am sure you said "The contractor"
that is the same with the insulation jobs, the person making contact with home owner "The contractor"
is responsable for the works agreed on, he/she is responable for any worker called into the job,
you cannot blame anyone else if they have failed to carry out a safe work practice.
That has already been clearly proven in court on this matter, why can't people accept it?

[harry climber]

The government have a duty of care for all their policies, when the government failed to implement this then that led to the "cowboys" being able to enter the insulation market.
The government have checks and controls on other industries, except they failed in this program.

The ALP were hasty in the rollout of insulation program, it had not been thought through by the government and that in itself led to the four deaths.