rehctub,

Well it was actually me who said that.

I'm not making excuses but there were also exactly the same number of accidental deaths within roof spaces during the Howard era.

The barring of unions from conducting workplace safety inspections during those years has also done nothing to reduce the appalling rate of industrial accidents and deaths in this country.

If you want to apportion direct blame, why not look at those Contractors who were directly responsible for those people they employ?

"...we ended up with far more debt than needed, and almost nothing to show for it, nothing at least that would help the economy".

No, we ended up with an economy that is still working.

When it come to having infrastrucure to show for good management, a dud railway between South Australia and the Northern Territory, some closed down hospitals plus a bunch of new flagpoles in schools isn't much of a legacy from those 10 glorious years of the previous government.

Wobbles,

For the vast fortunes spent by Labor, what have we to show for it? Railways? airports? Sweet Fanny Adams.

The Pink batts deaths and fires were directly related to the project, and did not include any other fires, and were in spite of written warnings to the minister.

So wobbles...I'm not making excuses but there were also exactly the same number of accidental deaths within roof spaces during the Howard era.

You mean during the largest building boom in our time!

You know, workplaces are becoming a complete joke. It is almost at the stage where for every worker, there is an observer.

While many may have a 10 or 12 hour shift, the time spent actually WORKING is a mere fraction of the time. The rest of the time is spent being inducted with the same safety stuff, day in day out, yet they still get hurt.

Either that, or they ate standing around waiting on someone else to do their job.

There are so many chiefs out there now that we face a serious risk of running out of indians.

Productivity is shot, and the fair days work for a fair days pay is pretty much gone.

Still, to this very day, even after the millions, if not billions spent on workplace safety awareness, we have workers being reprimanded over safety breaches.

Unfortunately legislators, unions etc just don't get it, you simply can't legislate against stupidity.

Dear Butcher,

Sorry but I have to ask, are you schizophrenic?

I mean it is hard to believe your lasts two posts are written by the same person.

While the Labour insulation scheme was the safest ever roll out of housing insulation causing less deaths per house than at any time in our building history, they were deaths that could have been better avoided if the government had taken greater ownership of the process.

Working in the building industry I know how much insulation installers have been, and to some extent still are, regarded as cowboys.

Training was virtually non-existent before the scheme and actions should have been undertaken to force contractors to tighten safety and training.

To me it is a deep failing of modern politicians of both sides. The sentiment seems to be hive the bloody thing off to the private sector and take no responsibility. It was the same with the Australian Wheat Board. I would hate to think of how many lives were lost by funding Saddam through nearly half a billion dollars of bribes.

Yet you seem to want to beat Rudd up over the deaths then say “Unfortunately legislators, unions etc just don't get it, you simply can't legislate against stupidity.”

Finally I can tell you that there aren't too many people sitting on their hands on any of the building sites I work on. Most are subbies nowadays and everyone is hard at it trying to come under the hours quoted if possible.

The safest in our history, with 4 deaths and nearly 200 directly caused house fires.

I would like to see your justification of this.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Sure mate. Shall we tackle the just over 150 house fires first?

Get comfy.

The CSIRO did an excellent study on the risk profile of the Home Insulation Program (HIP) which came out in April of last year though hats off to the Possum for the extra analysis.

The study showed that around 98% of fires caused by insulation will occur within twelve months of installation.

Pre HIP the number of fires per year in freshly (12 months) insulated homes was an average of 31.5. At the time there were about 70,000 homes being insulated per year in Australia. Doing the sums this delivers us a rate of 47.3 fires per 100,000 homes with insulation less than 12 months old.

So if we then do the sums for the 154 house fires in the 1,108,151 homes that were insulated under the scheme we get a rate of 13.9 fires per 100,000 homes which actually falls to 13.1 for the annualised rate.

So therefore the program delivered a risk of fire in homes with installation less than 12 months old smaller than one third the rate pre HIP.

Or to put it another way, it was three times as safe.

Let me know if there are any of the CSIRO's figures you have an issue with.

I am always intrigued how you guys spin yourselves out of facts like these, often quite ingenious really. I'm looking forward to seeing how you will approach this one. I'm sure I will be impressed.