It’s gotta be an election year. One, politics is getting interesting again and, two; the talking heads are starting to populate our television screens with an increasing frequency. So far, as I said above, it’s being interesting. Even with only light campaigning there have been plenty of gaffes, and foot-in-mouth disease seems to be highly contagious. Roll on election 2010.

There have been some worrying incidents for Labor so far and I’d like to cover two of them in this article. First up, with perhaps the most innocuous of comments, Julia Gillard has managed to piss off at least half of her electorate. Ms Gillard made a statement that she personally found tattoos on women unattractive and that she hoped the girls wouldn’t come to regret their decision later in life.

I live in Ms Gillard’s electorate and both I and beloved sport tattoos. I personally find tattoos on women incredibly attractive and can be found, on Tuesday evenings, gazing lovingly at Abby from NCIS. Couple this with the fact that on Friday night last week I went to a club, again in Ms Gillard’s electorate, to see a friends’ band (Behind Crimson Eyes - check them out, if you haven’t already) and I would conservatively place the percentage of female patrons with tattoos at about 70%.

On it’s own it was a throw away comment, and only Ms Gillard’s opinion. However, surely Ms Gillard has enough political experience to know that in an election year voicing personal opinions is a really bad thing to do. The media picked up on it, and as the media seem to be aligned with the Liberal party at present, plastered it on every flat surface it could find. It is still ruling the opinion pages at the moment and held its own against Insulationgate (sorry), which I’m going to cover next, for a couple of days.

I’m not really a fan of Peter Garrett. I wasn’t really a fan of Midnight Oil either. Mr Garrett seems a little out of his depth at times and probably needs K-Rudd to hold his hand a little while longer, however, as the PM is busy with Penny Wong, Pete’s on his own for the short term. I am not in the habit of defending politicians, however….

The insulation fiasco started a while back and was part of K-Rudd’s stimulus package. It was, and remains a good idea. If you owned an older home you were able to get brand new insulation installed for nix. This meant that older homes, being properly insulated, were able to save on heating and cooling thus using less gas and electricity, which in turn consumes less fossil fuels. Right, thumbs up. The scheme, as far as I can tell, had only one fatal flaw and that is human greed.

If you pay attention to what the media and the Liberal party tell us, one can assume that the whole thing was supervised by Peter Garrett. He hired the installers, took the orders and ultimately supervised every installation of insulation in Australia. This is of course ridiculous. What these people are saying is that there is nothing between Garrett and the installers. No regulatory bodies, no WorkSafe inspectors and no-one in charge of the firms doing the installing, it was just him and the workers.

The problem with schemes like this is that it takes a lot of people to make it happen. As most properly qualified people were probably busy building homes in the growth corridors, there was a void that needed to be filled. In come the fly-by-nighters and their unskilled workforce. They have a hammer, a ladder and a dozen Indian students ready to knock on your door and provide you with farm-fresh insulation. After the job’s done they get a nice healthy stipend from the government and a pat on the back.

Another problem was that insulation batts made in Australia cost too much and that was eating into these firms’ bottom line. A quick call to Asian importers soon fixed the problem and cheaper batts were quickly ordered. Never mind they were soaked in Formaldehyde and probably toxic to the residents, there’s profit to be had lads, saddle up!!

Then people started dying, well four people to be precise. It’s sad and I feel for the families, but I still don’t see why Peter Garrett is responsible. The truth of the matter is this: Someone has to go into the roof to lay down the insulation, in this case the foil kind. If you’re the boss you can send the young bloke you hired last week who has no practical experience, or you can go yourself and show him how to do it safely. I don’t know if any of you have been up in a roof but it’s hot, cramped and really uncomfortable, and it appears that some of the less scrupulous blokes were just saying “Up you go young fella and watch out for spiders”.

After the foil has been laid out it needs to be secured so the young bloke moves along with his nail gun punching nails every fifteen centimetres or so and eventually finds that his nails are piercing the mains power line into the house. The nail is attached to the foil which is made of metal which conducts electricity. You can see where it goes from here.

A simple question needs to be asked in both cases, who is at fault here? Is it Peter Garrett or is it the people that ordered the toxic batts? Is it Peter Garrett or the person who sent an untrained young man into a roof to nail down foil insulation? The deaths are regrettable, but they are workplace accidents and these happen with or without Government assistance. That’s the reason WorkSafe exist. Obviously a lot more insulation work is being done at the moment than normal, but I would like to compare the death rate between this year and the preceding years. I’m pretty sure that by comparison, on a percentage basis, it wouldn’t be that much higher.

Other people have approached the media and said that thirteen warnings were sent to Mr Garrett and that because he didn’t heed them there is blood on his hands. Okay, this is important, were they delivered to him personally or were they sent to his office? If they were sent to his office they may have been opened by anyone working for him. In fact, they may have been opened by thirteen different people over the last three years and all sent to the disregard pile. Knowing a little bit about how Ministers offices operate it is entirely possible that Mr Garrett never laid eyes on a single one. This is a failing of the system.

Mr Garrett’s office administered the scheme but I’m sure that the Master Builder’s Association and other regulatory bodies were also supervising it. Should it have been policed better? Yes of course it should have been. Should the credentials of the people performing the work have been better studied? Again, yes, but I’m pretty certain these are responsibilities of the States and not a Federal matter. Do the foreign batts comply with the Australian Design Regulations? They must if they were allowed into the country and if they do, then again that is not the fault of Mr Garrett.

The most reprehensible and despicable thing that has come out of the whole insulation scheme is that the death of four young Australians is now being used as political fodder by the opposition. They should at least be laid to rest without their lives being politicised the way they are now.

Oh, and Tony Abbott almost got himself killed on Colac Road. Ha ha ha. Just sayin….

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