The systemic failures are very simple and I want to start with those. Firstly, we know that there are 240, 000 houses which have either unsafe or dodgy insulation. There is no plan to find and fix the 240, 000 houses out of the potential million. Without a plan to examine all of the one million houses there is no solution to this problem, because almost one-quarter of them have either dangerous or dodgy insulation as a result of a program which was monumentally ill conceived and ill executed and which caused enormous human damage.
The second of the systemic failures is that there is no plan for small business in its oment of need right now. Small business is calling for assistance either in the form of a buyback or of financial assistance. There is a minor component in the existing program, but the small business program, which was promised almost two weeks ago, is now almost two weeks overdue and todays statement has come and gone without assistance for those firms which are laying off workers on a daily basis.
Almost 1, 500 workers have lost their Jobs, and there is no plan for small businesses which are currently going into liquidation. The third systemic failure in the statement today is that there is absolutely no ransparency in, honesty about or accountability for the extraordinary policy failings which represent perhaps the most systemic policy failure of the last 20 years in terms of its human consequencesnot one word about the costs of repairing the government’s program.
The National Electrical Contractors Association has referred to potentially $450 million as the cost of repairing a program which was already on track to being $1 billion over budget
