The intro says it all by claiming that the pink batts/home insulation program was a success. Yeah right, just ask the businesses that went bust with piles of suddenly useless insulation, the home owners waiting years to have safety checks or rectification work performed, or the families who lost loved ones from inadequate safety procedures and controls. It was a disaster and Peter Garrett was the scapegoat even though he had tried to warn Rudd of the risks.

Our local public school in country NSW got a library that was ridiculously small at about double the cost of a project home, it was sited in an awkward spot for maximum solar power, which then wasn't installed, all the work was done by people from outside the district and even the local city was overlooked when it was fitted out: everything came from 150 kilometres away.

The BER was only a Revolution in Education Bull. Most was wasted, state schools got half the building per dollar against comparable Catholic schools and often a building that was not wanted. Such top down 5 year, month or in this case 5 minute back of envelope plans always are a waste and no amount of hyperbowl will make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Labor's only legacy (except for the truly great exception of Hawke) has been to leave a mess to cleaned up. The Party needs to find a mechanism to broaden its sources of members beyond patronage and in particular, get some adults in.

Judy, obviously if your process of reasoning is illogical, your construction of the evidence will be illogical.

And that's all you've got.

If you actually thought about your topic instead of just *emoting* about it, you would see how ridiculous it is to claim that any policy was a success on the ground that the beneficiaries were happy with it.

Obviously if we don't count the costs, anything will seem beneficial - durr!

This merely shows the infantile level of moral and economic reasoning that underlies Judy's reasoning, and Stiglitz's too for that matter. (Appeal to absent authority = logical fallacy. You need to be able to justify your argument, not just point to a high priest of the parasite industries preaches that force-based parasitic behaviour is moral and productive.)

This flawed intellectual method underlies all socialist reasoning. They take from group A and give to group B, and then claim that the result confers a benefit on society, without ever dealing with the obvious possibility whether it was an act of mere pillage. When questioned, they merely repeat the method of baldly asserting social benefits without ever coming to terms with the questions of value involved in their violence- and fraud-based redistributions.

Nor has Judy addressed the social costs of the forced indoctrination of children into her anti-economic anti-freedom state-worshipping irrational superstition.

Your challenge Judy is to show that the policy conferred a net social benefit, compared to what would have obtained in the absence of the policy, accounting for the counter-factual in units of a lowest common denominator, and showing without a double standard how you justify the unprovoked aggression as the value basis of it all.

Go ahead. All you're doing now is making a fool of yourself without apparently any shame or understanding.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/chris-pyne-and-ber-waste/

This is a piece I wrote last year, it gives facts instead of whinges by liberal party nitwits.

Excellent article. Very well argued.

As Rodney Tiffin demonstrated, most of the furore was generated by the Murdoch press with no valid reason:

http://inside.org.au/a-mess-a-shambles-a-disaster/

@Mikko, can you see how your comments simply illustrate this point by both Professor Tiffin and Ms Crozier?

Outside the Murdoch media is there any actual evidence that the insulation scheme was other than an outstanding success?

@Candide, can you please advise the name of that school? As a journo I have followed up every such example given in forums such as this. All of them so far have turned out to be baseless.

May I please follow up this example also? Will advise the upshot here.

Thanks, Candide.

@McCackie and Jardine K. Jardine:

Wondering if either of you actually understand the purpose of the scheme. It appears not.

It was absolutely NOT to provide school facilities on a needs basis in a cost effective manner. Don’t let the media suck you in.

Re: “Your challenge Judy is to show that the policy conferred a net social benefit, compared to what would have obtained in the absence of the policy …”

Correct.

This she did - paragraphs 15 and 16.

The main purpose of the stimulus packages was to get $42 billion into circulation as rapidly as possible as economies around the world were tanking. This they did. All of the $42 billion ended up precisely where it was intended — in Australia’s steadily growing economy.

Australia’s economy is now number one in the world. Thanks primarily to the stimulus packages of 2008-10.

The net social benefit has been to secure jobs, incomes, wage rises, GDP growth, productivity increases, lower taxes, low inflation, low interest rates and the highest standard of living of any nation in the world.

As a bonus, the nation now has more fixed assets. And as an extra minor side effect - school kids and teachers have much better facilities.

Cheers,

Alan