Peter Garrett:

Moira Smith writes: Re. “Foiled logic: under Garrett rule, most ministers have blood on hands” (Friday, item 1). As Bernard Keane (a former public servant) knows so well, when the Government (of whatever stripe) announces a vote-getting initiative, it has to be implemented YESTERDAY. Despite the regular yearly cuts on all public service departments, it HAS to happen — NOW. “Get the money out the door” is the cry … otherwise the Opposition spokesman will get up in Parliament Question Time and ask “How many xxx have been implemented since the Government’s announcement of xxxx …?”

Meanwhile the general public loves to hear gripes and moans about “layers of Government bureaucracy” … they want things to happen IMMEDIATELY — they underestimate, or simply don’t understand, the complications of any large public endeavour, especially one involving lots of money. They don’t stop to think that it could be those very — despised — layers of bureaucracy (i.e. careful people doing their painstaking jobs) that could prevent cowboys hi-jacking a fundamentally sensible and well-meaning policy. (To spell it out, I mean a boring system of inspections by “bureaucrats” checking out those “insulation installers” who wish to cash in on the new rebate for insulation — a boring system that could well delay the INSTANT RESULTS the Government and the public both seem to demand.)

Observations:

  1. When we had our roof insulation topped up a few years ago (before the rebate) the (reputable, long-established local) insulation guys insisted that we get an electrical inspection first.
  2. On Friday night I had an unsolicited phone call from someone working for someone, inquiring had we had our roof insulated under the Government rebate. I told her I was on the “do not call register” and she wasn’t allowed to phone me. I forgot to ask her to say again, clearly, who she was working for (just wanted to get back to cooking my dinner).

When will Australians (or people anywhere) understand that standing on top of Parliament House throwing bunches of dollar bills into the wind and into the hands of eager recipients (no paperwork! instant results!) is no way to run a  state? That the “grey cardiganned” bureaucrats sitting at their boring desks on their boring arses [and this is no longer true, some of us are quite young (or almost young…) and colourful, not to mention highly educated and motivated] are in fact doing the nation a service in crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s? E.g. perhaps — if they had the time to do so — ensuring that those contractors so eager and willing to go into people’s rooves to install insulation are in fact qualified to do so?

Peter Lloyd writes: Bernard Keane perhaps has a point in arguing Peter Garrett is being unfairly asked to shoulder the blame for how ceiling insulation blokes aim their staple guns.  Like gangsters’ court convictions, rarely do politicians go down for their real wrongdoing.

But it would not be beyond all fairness for Garrett to go.  If the insulation program was about lowering energy use, the government would simply subsidise the material and that would be that.  People would either install their own, and be more likely to accept responsibility for the few accidents, or else they would pay their usual handy(wo)man, whom they would presumably select on a basis including reputation and reliability.

But modern politics can’t work this way.  An environmental program can’t be initiated without some overpaid sociopath (i.e., ministerial advisor) looking for the “angle”, in this case, to “create employment” or to create a grateful industry. But to anyone with knowledge of the real world, the approach taken was always, inevitably, going to attract a certain class of “small business operator”.

These opportunists buy an old ute and hire the cheapest possible labour and try to screw out as much as they can, as fast as they can.  Because this was foreseeable, Garrett’s failure to act on warnings about the dangers was culpable, because it was clear such an industry — lacking all standards — would be completely incapable of self-regulation, and that those in danger would be, too often, young naive school drop outs.

Ray Edmondson writes: According to this morning’s Financial Review, in the 12 months to June 2009, BHP’s operations in the Pilbara had cost five lives, two of them employees of HWE Mining, a unit of Leighton Holdings. By Tony Abbott’s logic, should the CEOs of BHP, HWE and Leightons resign? What responsibility for these deaths is borne by their boards? Or by their shareholders (of which I am one)?

Tony Abbott’s use of selective logic to score points off Peter Garrett and the government does no credit to the integrity of the Coalition. It plays politics with personal tragedy and is, incidentally, a huge waste of parliamentary time. Nor do his tactics seem consistent with the Christian principles he likes to wear on his sleeve.

It is extraordinary that so much of the media has uncritically taken Abbott’s stance at face value — Crikey, and Jack Waterford in Saturday’s Canberra Times, being honorable exceptions to this and thankfully injecting some perspective into the issue.

David Hand writes: Here’s a scenario for you. Cast you minds back about 11 months. Kevin Rudd is on all TV channels saying “Roll up! Roll up! $900 for everyone! Schools halls even if you don’t need it!  We must spend $48b whether we need it or not!  Doing nothing is not an option!  Free home insulation!  Have we got a deal for you!”

At this point, a retired rock star, not loved by any ALP insiders, given a token job, kept as a feel-good mascot to show Kevin is green and hip, sticks his head up and says, “The insulation project can’t go ahead because the installers are not regulated and trained and workers might die.”

Is there something about this scenario that gives anyone a sense that it could have actually occurred?

Niall Clugston writes: The irony of the insulation controversy is that the Liberals, supposedly the party of free enterprise, are advocating highly-centralised hyper-regulation.

Afghanistan:

Neil James, Executive Director, Australia Defence Association, writes:  Re. “Congressman Charlie Wilson’s war is finally over” (11 February, item 16). Only in Crikey could Charles Richardson’s initial ahistoric comparison that Afghanistan was better off under the Soviet Union (or a Soviet-backed puppet government), and Vietnam under the South Vietnamese regime, be criticised only by Guy Rundle (Friday, comments) from the even more ahistoric and ideological angle that the South Vietnam parallel was supposedly incorrect.

Both of your columnists ignore that the Soviet Union’s sponsoring of successive communist coups in Afghanistan from 1978, culminating in a Soviet invasion and brutal occupation 1979-89, killed many hundreds of thousands, destroyed Afghan civil society in detail, caused five million refugees to flee and sent Afghanistan spiralling down to arguably even worse rule by squabbling warlords and then the Taliban (1989-2001) after the Soviets were finally forced out.

Most of Afghanistan’s continuing problems are the direct result of the immense human, social, economic and infrastructural damage inflicted in the 1978-2001 period — not results of the UN-endorsed international intervention and reconstruction effort since 2002.

Similarly, whatever the real and perceived ills of South Vietnamese governments, most Vietnamese (formerly South or North) would probably now opt for that type of imperfect but multi-party government if ever given the chance in a free vote to throw off  communist rule in their authoritarian one-party state.

What next, claims by Rundle that Russians and Cambodians were better off under Stalin and Pol Pot respectively than they would have been under democratic governments?

Charles Richardson writes: Guy Rundle (Friday, comments) complains that my comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam “so abstract[s] the regimes themselves from the circumstances in which they occurred as to become meaningless.” But I’m not convinced that the context he provides really makes that much difference.

South Vietnam’s origins were artificial and discreditable, true; so are those of many countries. That doesn’t alter the fact that as the war in fact panned out, the South was fighting to preserve a deeply flawed (“corrupt and authoritarian”, as I put it) but nonetheless at least semi-free state, whereas the North was fighting to establish a communist dictatorship.

Obviously having the war end was better than having it continue, but I think it’s tolerably clear that the people of South Vietnam would have been better off had it ended with a Northern defeat than (as it did) with a Northern victory.

Rundle in Athens:

Diana Simmonds writes: Re. “Rundle in Athens: it’s all Greek to me” (Friday, item 5). I may be naïve (probably) but I don’t see any mention anywhere of the words “Athens Olympic Games” in reference to the parlous state of the Greek coffers.