What a disaster.

We need to understand however, that this order of waste is going on in all government departments, it’s just that it’s less visible and the enthusiasts for government action are perpetually blind to it.

Statists of course blame an unregulated market: too many “cowboys”. But a government scheme to hand out billions of dollars in goods or services that people aren’t willing to pay for is by definition not a market phenomenon.

The attempts of people to capitalise on the waste certainly is a market phenomenon. But that can only be fixed either before, or after the fact. It could only be fixed beforehand by complete government control of everything. And it could only be fixed up after the fact by ever-increasing government regulation of everything.

To say the problems caused by governmental intervention should be fixed by more, rather than less government, is to display an unfalsifiable belief, the deep structure of which is as follows:
‘Because problem, therefore government is the solution.’
Then when any problem arises from that approach, the same approach is applied:
‘Because problem, therefore government is the solution.’

Even though Chris Lewis criticises the scheme, his approach is essentially the same: more “scrutinisation” (governmental action) is the solution.

The problem with this circular belief is that it is never able to see beyond the superficial level of the immediate problem.

The unintended negative consequences of governmental action often pop up in an unrelated field. For example governments funded scientists to find that we’re all going to boil to death, the solution to which is government funding of pink batts, which produces negative consequences, so the government licenses batt installers, which is the story so far. But the unintended consequences go on, perhaps in making insulation less affordable and therefore wasting energy or lives, or perhaps increasing unemployment, or perhaps in a scam in the compulsory insurances thus established. To which, the solution is always, more government.

This modern unfalsifiable and therefore irrational belief is in its deep structure no different from pre-modern superstitions like rain dances or sacrificing virgins.

If this was done by a private corporation, the directors responsible for it would be in prison for a very long time.

So what happened to the corporate directors in this case? Well one is retired on a $600,000 pension paid for by all the people he defrauded, the other has been promoted to the leadership of the entire government, and another has been rewarded with less work for the same amount of money.

Ideally of course they should all be in prison, but short of that, perhaps the next most moral solution would be for all the people who voted for these clowns to be forced to pay back the whole lot to those who didn’t?

In future, disasters like this could be avoided by the following method:
“Hands up all those who want to pay for a scheme to install pink batts for free so as to stop everyone on the planet from boiling to death for which the evidence is dubious and self-interested, at best, and fraudulent at worst?”
(Show of hands)
“Right. *You* pay for it. And no pink batt schemes for you until you do.”

We would then see a bit more economical pink batt installing I’ll warrant.

The whole Batts debacle is going to haunt us for a long time. I find the lean of this article to proportion blame only to the federal government ignorant. Yes they and especially minister Garrett should have seen the routing issue at the start and organised what to do quickly. As i have previously stated on this, simply having the states make insulation require a development application and inspection would have stopped most of the issues. Where were the state based OH&S people when it comes to work place deaths and their responsibility in this. As for the electrical trades industry, i bet they warned of the risk as a result of generations of poor quality wire that runs through so many homes in the suburbs. The cheap batt imports? where were the Australian standards?

As for the 'Because problem, therefore government is the solution’ bit there is of course the mirror problem to this. The 'leave it to the private sector and market forces'. Remember these? they are the fools that bought us the GFC that was the cause of the need to spend so much money so fast to save our butts that it was a stuff up in the first place. Really well run bank schemes and falling super plans, collapsing businesses and dodgy board decisions. On and on it goes and how many of them are heading to prison? No we just had to spend trillions world wide to save their butts.

The balance between government and private is the illusive prize we all are searching for, but being one eyed won't get us there.

There are many parallels and lessons here which need to be applied to the relentless ill-considered push for an ETS or carbon tax.
The same mismanagement, cover ups, waste, rorting and deaths, transposed onto a global scale, as we have already begun to witness.

The whole Batts debacle is going to haunt us for a long time.

it won't haunt me

My houses were either already insulated or did not qualify on the basis of size (bigger than a chook pen)

But we should not forget

The deaths

the wasted resources

The additional resources supposedly spent fixing the mess

I have one friend who set up an insulating company, based on alternative materials and is now down $150k + with no chance of recoupment.

He is but one of the private investor individuals, encouraged by this rat-bag government of the bungling inept to invest in providing these services and now abandoned as the headless chook looks to cover its own arse in the run up to election.

Some of us voted Liberal-Coalition

and will do again

"Maintain the commonsense" and talk with swinging voters

Our taxes, our resources, our future and our childrens future

no one can afford to leave back-stabbing, incompetent, faction lead and union ruled, power junkies in positions of government.

Socialism is so well suited to the inpotence of opposition. There they can wring their hands and beat their chests and make stirring speeches about nothing at all and it just does not matter but government... they just do not have the bottle.

"Remember these? they are the fools that bought us the GFC that was the cause of the need to spend so much money so fast to save our butts that it was a stuff up in the first place. Really well run bank schemes and falling super plans, collapsing businesses and dodgy board decisions."

You are only displaying the circular belief that I have just described.

Government grants itself a monopoly of the supply of money: you know, the stuff that is used in every financial transaction, as in Global *Financial* Crisis? Now giving someone - anyone - a licence to print money predictably ends in exactly the kinds of negative unintended consequences that in fact happened: endless printing of money, falling value of each money unit, inflation, bubble in the area in which the new money enters the economy, diversion of capital from productive fields into malinvestments based on observed tendency of never-ending rise in value, attempts to hedge risk in the underlying disaster (aka derivatives bubble), inevitable collapse of the boom, bankruptcies, unemployment, etc.

The circularity of the belief system is shown by the fact that many of the governmental interventions which are originally supposed to be solutions, are themselves later described as problems. For example, nairbe buys into the belief that we "need" government to take billions of dollars from ordinary people and pay it to big multi-national corporations to 'save our butts' (government as all-knowing benevolent saviour); but then defines this divisive behaviour as a problem in need of solution by - guess what - more government of course.

"The balance between government and private is the illusive prize we all are searching for, but being one eyed won't get us there."

That assumes that the problem is "out there" (government as perfect).

The real balance that is missing is to question the unfalsifiable belief: what if it's *not* true that government makes society better by monopolising the money supply, or giving away free pink batts? Then the whole train of reasoning collapses, doesn't it?