Please provide the link.

You also failed to compare the number of deaths, which is the prime measure of safety, and what primarily sunk the pink batts project. The fires came later.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Sorry for the delay.

Completely forgot until good ol' SPQR reminded me you were waiting on links.

First the CSIRO report which can be found here.
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/hisp/~/media/publications/hisp/csiro-report-hisp-2011-pdf.pdf

Possum's analysis can be found here.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2011/04/24/the-csiro-gets-hip-to-debunking-media-hysteria/

I haven't had time to drum up the worker stats. They are buried deep in a Parliamentary Inquiry from what I can recall and will take a little research. I will see what I can find.

I note the bosses of Mr Sweeney, a young man who was electrocuted in Queensland installing insulation have been fined but without conviction.

“The court heard Titan gave a verbal directive to workers in late 2009 about using plastic staples.”

“However, the court heard another worker would give evidence that he and Mr Sweeney ignored those instructions because it was faster to work with metal ones.”

"Titan supplies us with the plastic staples and we go and buy our own metal staples," Andre Palomar, brother of Frederick Ramon Palomar, said in a statement.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/bosses-in-court-over-qld-insulation-death-of-mitchell-sweeney/story-e6frf7kf-1226124644917

In this case I would have thought there were two substantial layers of responsibility before anyone can wag a finger in Garrett's direction.

I read the CSIRO report as opposed to the Crickey analysis and in the summary on Pages 3 and 4:

The fire rate per houses pre HIP is 2.5 fires per 100 000, and in the HIP houses phase 2 is 7.4 in the first 40 Days.

Please correct me if I have misinterpreted it.

Neither deal with the issue that caused such a furore, which is the deaths of installers, which Garrett was specifically warned about.

Dear Shadow Minister,

It was you who said "The safest in our history, with 4 deaths and nearly 200 directly caused house fires. I would like to see your justification of this."

Therefore you have tied the house fires with a judgement about the safety of the scheme.

You now seem to be wriggling away from this part of your original contention.

I am happy to go through the figures with you, and yes you have misinterpreted them, but not if at the end you are going to claim it to be of little consequence, something you appear to be laying the ground work for right now.

If you end up conceding the figures to be accurate are you prepared to acknowledge in a direct statement that with regard to house fires this was the safest rollout of housing insulation in our history?

If the answer is yes I'm happy to do the work, if no then what would be the point?

Csteele,

I am interested that you don't find the 4 fatalities the prime safety issue.

But knock yourself out. As far as the house fires were concerned, please show me how the conclusions of the CSIRO were wrong.

Dear Shadow Minister,

You wrote; “I am interested that you don't find the 4 fatalities the prime safety issue.”

Please stop trolling my friend, it is unbecoming.

In asking “please show me how the conclusions of the CSIRO were wrong” I am assuming a deal has been struck and will proceed.

Firstly the conclusions of the CSIRO are not wrong, it is your interpretation of them that is at fault.

The fire call out rate per houses pre HIP is 2.5 fires per 100 000 is of all insulated properties. If we take pre HIP houses that had been insulated for over a year then the figure is 2.4 per 100,000. (it should be noted that after 12 months the figure for houses insulated during the program is 1.63, a noticeable drop.). What you attempt to do is compare this with the figure for HIP houses in phase 2 which is 7.4 in the first 40 Days which is entirely misleading.

What you need to do is include the 7.4 in a 12 month figure for the fire call out rate for houses pre HIP and while the CSIRO doesn't provide these directly what the Possum has done in the Crikey piece is to show that the data tells us there were approximately 47.3 fires fire call outs per 100,000 homes.

The rate for HIP installations within the first 12 months of installation is 13.1.

It is just a case of comparing apples with apples.