Not at all, SM.

If the Queensland Coroner nails any federal government, he nails the Howard Government.

As he found:

“Prior to the HIP, the home insulation sector had no mandated training or skill requirements, training levels and barriers to new entrants. At the inception of the HIP, South Australia was the only State with licensing requirements for insulation installers.”

“The Commonwealth had no regulatory powers to enforce compliance with any laws. However, it could deregister an installer from the HIP if they breached guidelines.”

That is just appalling, SM!

Why was an established industry which had a history of fires, injuries and deaths in many countries, including Australia, so poorly regulated when the GFC hit in 2008?

Why was the training regime in place so inadequate?

Why was the frenzy of extra regulation, new procedures and training guidelines – which the Rudd Government implemented – necessary at all? Why were they not already securely in place?

The Rudd Government did nothing to make roof cavities more dangerous or render Australian workers less amenable to training. All it did was increase the volume of installations.

Regulations which ensure safety in ten house ceilings should not need to be different from regulations for work in 100 ceilings or 1,000 or a million.

The Government in place when the GFC hit acted swiftly and effectively under enormous time pressures to ameliorate the safety risks as they became known through 2009.

The Government from 1996 to 2007 when the industry was expanding significantly, in contrast, appears to have failed to monitor and deal with these risks. It did not even provide a record of injuries and deaths which occurred in the insulation industry during that period.

Read the report in its entirety, SM. You will be ashamed you ever voted for the Coalition.

Cheers,

AA

That would look great on a T-shirt, Ludwig.

>>Relative intangibility does NOT equate to meaninglessness!<<

But let's be honest. It doesn't actually make sense, does it.

Even if you were to find some kind of compromise position through your process of discovery. Which I strongly doubt.

>>We get our experts to come up with dollar values for these ‘intangibles’. We then have them debated amongst all interested parties, call for public submissions, and ultimately come up with values that the majority can agree on. Or some similar process.<<

As a businessman, I can see more than a few holes in this process. Who gets a guernsey as an "expert", first of all. Would you disqualify experts in economic theory, for example, but allow free rein to the Sustainable Population Party? That might seem an extreme example, but it does give you some idea how impossible it will be to get agreement. And if you don't have agreement (there is widespread agreement on the components of GDP, after all), what credibility will your GPI have?

>>Only taking into account easily measurable things would be absolute folly.<<

But if that is a folly, it is one that you indulge in every day of your life. Would you drive a car manufactured by a company that has devised its own set of measurements with which to design its brake system? Would you take a flight in an aeroplane whose manufacturer had built it to the specifications of a committee containing only Greenpeace activists?

Measurability is critical, Ludwig. Everything else is pure fantasy.

Speaking of tools...

"Covering 96% of the world’s population and 99% of global GDP, the Index provides a more complete picture of global prosperity than any other tool of its kind."

http://www.li.com/programmes/prosperity-index

Easy to read and full of great graphics:

"The Legatum Institute has topped a poll by the Harvard Business Review for charts and graphics that have changed the way people think in 2013."

Australia still holding 10th place over the past five years.

Alan,

I did read the report, and you are grasping at straws. Labor's negligence was clearly identified as a major contributor to the deaths.

As for the BER, the three greatest failings were:

1 The government built schools were seldom what each school needed most,
2 The buildings the government managed cost on average twice what similar buildings managed by independent schools,
3 The majority of the expenditure occurred well after the initial GFC when it was needed and had no effect on saving jobs.

Alan, You are right, the energy saving from pink batts, could be saving energy for years, however, those savings are needed, with energy bills that have doubled again and again, and so far ahead of inflation, to be almost breath taking!
Incidentally, I have pink batts and would have personally preferred the roll out of solar hot water units.
One of which completely offsets the energy consumed by air conditioning the average home.
And yes, investing in education has long term benefits as well and something that eventually contributed to the emergence of the Celtic tiger; only cruelled by foreign speculators, and their huge debt burdens.
However, the economy boost needed during the GFC, was a here and now imperative, and we would have been better served, I believe, by the building of many low cost homes, which would have still employed all those trades etc.
The only difference, the ongoing rent roll that improves with time, could have been reinvested in more of the same, thereby ending the huge and growing levels of homelessness, and shameful in one of the richest nations on earth.
And if you like energy savings Alan, then you would love Aussie smell free innovation, that turns average biological waste, into enough alternative endlessly sustainable energy, to completely power the average home or high rise, indefinitely!
Once the infrastructure costs are recovered, virtually for free, along with endless free hot water!
The addition of food scraps/waste, creates a salable surplus!
The by products are thoroughly sanitized, carbon rich, soil improving fertilizer, high in both nitrates and phosphates, and reusable water, eminently suitable for oil rich algae production!
Rhrosty.

I wrote:

>> Relative intangibility does NOT equate to meaninglessness! <<

Pericles, you retorted:

<< That would look great on a T-shirt, Ludwig. >>

Heeey… I think you might be onto something there!

So you are still asserting that if something can’t be easily measured… and different people are likely to come up with different measurements based on their differing views of how important things are… and these measurements are likely to change through time as opinions change on the relative importance of different factors… then it must be meaningless!

That’s an incredible position to uphold! (This certainly seems to be your position, or am I inadvertently verballing you?)

Look at the Wellbeing Manifesto: http://wellbeingmanifesto.net/ (see in particular No. 9)

It is full of things that are not easily measurable, at least not without a large degree of subjectivity. But these factors, I hope you can agree, are of vital importance.

<< Measurability is critical, Ludwig. Everything else is pure fantasy. >>

Deaaar oh deary me! That is just so so sooooo wrong Pericles! ( :>(