Australia conducted a Royal Commission in to the Esso Gas Plant explosion at Longford. Two people died and most of Victoria was without gas for around two weeks. The Royal Commission lead to a best-selling book by Professor Andrew Hopkins. In 2010, four young men died while installing home insulation as part of a government economic stimulus package. A Royal Commission and various inquests were held but no one wrote a book. Outside of the occupational health and safety (OHS) fraternity, the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program (HIP) is, in many ways, the forgotten inquiry.
Andrew Hopkins wrote of the Esso Royal Commission:
“An industrial accident in which two workers had been killed would not normally stimulate such a vigorous response by government. but this was no ordinary industrial accident. It had political and economic consequences which went way beyond the workplace.” (page 3)
One difference between the Esso Royal Commission and the HIP inquiry is that Esso had political and economic consequences where the Home Insulation Program had political and economic causes.
Also the latest spate of Royal Commissions, particularly those established by the conservative Abbott Government, have had obvious political purposes. The Abbott Government announced the HIP Royal Commission in December 2013 only three months after gaining power. There had already been three inquiries in to the program and the workplace fatalities but the Abbott Government smelt the opportunity to embarrass senior opposition political figures, including the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The HIP cockup also would reinforce the line pushed by the conservative parties for decades, that the Australian Labor Party were inept economic managers.
Two senior Labor Party politicians who were involved with managing, or rather salvaging, the HIP, and who appeared at the Royal Commission, have written political autobiographies that reveal their thoughts on the Home Insulation Program.
The most public of these authors is Peter Garrett. Garrett was a prominent anti-nuclear activist and lead singer of Midnight Oil before entering Parliament. Garrett wrote about his involvement with HIP in a chapter entitled “The Fall Guy”. He writes that he and his department did everything they could to manage a program that was imposed on them
“……certain that I’d done everything I could to deliver the government program and to make it as safe as possible under the circumstances.” (page 363)
and seems to agree that the administration was beyond them.
“inexperienced officials struggling to manage the volume of insulation activity…” (page 364).
The causes for this situation are that his environment department had little input into a scheme that was designed as a job creation and economic stimulus package, and there was little interest from the Prime Minister, an architect of the scheme, into the challenges of managing it.
Garrett is critical of some of the employers who took advantage of the scheme by continuing to use metal fasteners on metal foil; fasteners “which I’d banned months earlier” (page 360). He also notes that in the inquiries into the Queensland deaths:
“…..the employers were found to have ignored the scheme’s guidelines and a number were subsequently found guilty of negligence, and in one case of perjury, and fined.” (page 361)
Echoing many of the scheme’s critics, Garrett writes:
“The speed of the rollout and the fact that occupational health and safety was a state responsibility…… meant the program relied on the companies and individuals involved to do the right thing. Most did, but some, including those in the fatalities, didn’t.” (page 361)
OHS remains a fragmented State responsibility.
On the critical issue of responsibility, Garret writes:
“Responsibility for the program’s failures lay primarily with the central agencies – Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Finance – that designed and supervised the scheme……
It is the case that the program was rushed, but that was necessary; if it hadn’t been done quickly, it wouldn’t have achieved its economic purpose. But it did mean mistakes were made. It was too open to shonks, and the environment department struggled to administer it in such a way as to reduce rick even further.
My view was that the government should take responsibility for this program, but not solely.” (page 369)
On the issue of the Royal Commission, Garrett writes that “inquiry was a waste of public money”. (page 370)
Garrett would have been well aware of OHS responsibilities through this time as an environmental activist due to the frequent overlap between environmental and OHS practices but the HIP scheme generated significant regrets:
“Of all my regrets from this period, my assumption that employers and workers would take proper care of those under their charge is the greatest.” (page 370)
If Garrett had a stronger industrial relations background, he would have known of the unreliability of such an assumption. It was the failure of that type of assumption that has generated OHS laws.
“There were tens of thousands of homes with substandard insulation installations, some posing fire risks. Shonky operators had committed fraud against the Commonwealth by claiming payments for work they had not done. Tragically, four young workers had died while installing insulation under the program.” (page 226)
Combet enacted the closure of the program that Garrett had been advocating and instigated a risk assessment of two hundred and fifty thousand homes that had been part of the HIP scheme.
He echoed Garrett’s concerns over the behaviour of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Combet was blind-sided into a press conference on the day he was given the responsibility of fixing the scheme.
“I think that Rudd was sometimes so burdened that he simply didn’t register what had been said to him.” (page 228)
Combet’s autobiography is riddled with OHS issues from his time at a Workers Health Centre in the 1980s, visiting factories and steelworks, through his battle against James Hardie Industries over compensation for asbestos victims. The James Hardie negotiations provided Combet with a perspective into corporate deliberations that few outside of Boards ever see. It also strengthened his thoughts on corporate morality.
“The experience showed that if you can identify an injustice, bring it to the public’s attention in a compelling way, forge alliances with other organisations, and conduct a focused campaign, you can achieve unlikely victories, even from a position of weakness. This case also illustrates the need for those running corporations to recognise they have moral obligations and social responsibilities as well as duties to stakeholders.” (page 166)
There is some hope in these words for those OHS advocates whose lifelong frustration transforms into cynicism.
The various inquiries into the Home Insulation Program provided a more accurate picture of the Australian business community’s attitudes to workplace safety than any of the Government inquiries into workplace relations frameworks or productivity. The Federal Government provided an opportunity for quick money which was grabbed by small- and micro-businesses. Safety was seen, by some, as an impediment to this quick cash and so was ignored. One can look at corporate behaviour for evidence of profit over safety but the evidence is clear in this sector and in this scheme.
The Trade Union Royal Commission may be the flavour of the month by exposing corruption and the abuse of OHS but the deaths of four young men, the coronial inquiries, the prosecutions by State OHS regulators, and the Royal Commission illustrate all of the social, structural impediments to achieving safe workplaces. But no one’s reading about them because no one’s writing about them. If there was to be one book about Australian OHS and its sociopolitical context, it is the home insulation program that should be written about because it too has
“political and economic consequences which went way beyond the workplace.”
Filed under: accountability, asbestos, book, business, Combet, death, Duty of Care, economics, environment, Garrett, government, health, industrial relations, insulation, Kevin Rudd, law, OHS, politics, safety, union, workplace
