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Rudd Government failings vs. achievements
- Thread starter sam76
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Since you seem to have all the answers trainspotter perhaps you can tell me why all 5 agency's taking bets on this years election have the Govt as a very short priced favourite to win, and the coalition as an extreme outsider, given almost no chance of winning.
I await your wisdom with eager anticipation.
Pol Pot and Stalin also enjoyed a similar popularity ... it didn't last.
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Well if MR Rudd wins the next election after all these failings that would have to be the achievement to end all achievements and end this debate
So_Cynical
The Contrarian Averager
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LOL no i don't think i did...i pretty much nailed it.
Liberals/nationals can only do good, have a right to rule and make only small mistakes on the rare occasions they they do make mistakes.
Labor is evil, can only do bad, and makes a mess of everything...and yet somehow there going to win this election...if only all the poor deluded Australians that support Rudd & Co could see what you do...then we would all live in a perfect, right wing, totalitarian dictatorship.
Oh come on...just like the Health reform thread is about health reform...right.
Just like little Johnny and Co....oh those were the days.
No ETS talk, Green house gases were something that affected the rest of the world, all we had to worry about were 700 Iraqis on boats trying to que jump, one or two harmless local white supremacists and bludging wharfies....ah the good old days.
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LOL no i don't think i did...i pretty much nailed it.
Liberals/nationals can only do good, have a right to rule and make only small mistakes on the rare occasions they they do make mistakes.
Labor is evil, can only do bad, and makes a mess of everything...and yet somehow there going to win this election...if only all the poor deluded Australians that support Rudd & Co could see what you do...then we would all live in a perfect, right wing, totalitarian dictatorship.
Oh come on...just like the Health reform thread is about health reform...right.
Just like little Johnny and Co....oh those were the days.
You might want to go in search of a bigger hammer if you think you have nailed it !! LOLOLOL
Good to see you can actually disseminate the clean from the dirty politics and break it down to it's simplest form so that the Neanderthals and Troglodytes can understand the machinations of the Westminster two party preferred system we have here in Banana Republic Land. Well done So_Cynical ... I could not have done this justice or got down to such a lowbrow level to elucidate this to the comrades and brothers wearing their blue singlets with King Gee shorts and Winnie Reds hanging from the corner of their mouths.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh yes ..... them were the days young whippersnapper, affordable housing, steady interest rates, money in the bank, land of milk and honey. Then I woke up, don't delude yourself So_Cynical .... I am prepared to knock whichever Party is not leading this country in the manner it deserves, make no mistake about that. Waste and reckless spending has driven out good judgement and the voting people are blinded by spin and rhetoric like a cheap magic show.
How about this for an idea So_Cynical .... instead of blowing $900 x 3 and calling it a stimulus package, add in the Pink Batt money and then throw in the BER Scheme monies to boot do you think this would have been enough to cover some of the costs of this hospital reform? DOH !
Well spoken trainspotter. By the way what has happened to Rudd's ETS?
Is Penny Wong gone to sleep, on holidays, on sick leave or has Rudd deported her to China?
The ETS semms to be dead and buried!!!!!!!!!!!
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Why would Penny be deported to China?
Oh dear not the race card so early in the morning please
BTW she was born in Malaysia
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Penny Who ?? And what is an ETS ??? Ooooooopsies .. another slight of hand to take our eye off the prize. Let's now attack Health Reform, afterall it worked for Obama and they even named it Obamacare. I think we could call this one Kruddhealth. Te he !
Achievement: Greatest singular, progressive, visionary reform of the Health and Hospital sytem in Australia.
Fail: Lack of detail or structure to implement the above in a manner to derive efficiencies.
Achievement: Greatest singular, progressive, visionary reform of the Health and Hospital sytem in Australia.
Fail: Lack of detail or structure to implement the above in a manner to derive efficiencies.
DON'T knock the EST, all them hard working people needed a Holiday, you are just sore that you and I paid for it..
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LOL@pilots ... they still have 150 people on staff for this dept. and ZERO result. Pigs in the trough, pigs in the trough.
How Rudd blows your billions
Andrew Bolt
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 07:11am
THINK you must now have heard the worst of Kevin Rudd’s colossal waste of your billions?
Think nothing could top Rudd’s spending $1.5 billion on free insulation so dodgy that he must spend an estimated $450 million more to pull it out or make it safe?
Then check out this shack above.
It’s actually a school library being built at Stuarts Point with cash from perhaps the most scandalously wasteful of all the Rudd Government’s “stimulus” packages.
How much would you pay for it, do you think? $150,000? $200,000, tops?
Ha! Try $931,000, sucker. And that’s out of your pocket, too.
For a contrast, check what you’d get for less than a quarter of the price if the school had cut out the Government middlemen and simply picked a whole house off the shelf from a builder.
Ezyhomes, for instance, offers a 182sq m house called the Outlook (below), with a huge central area just right for a reading or teaching area, as well as three bedrooms you could use for the books, or knock out to make bigger spaces. Add toilets, kitchen and veranda and you’d still have change from $220,000.
Or check what the Australian Construction Handbook of 2008 says you should actually pay for a single-storey primary school building - around $1300 per square metre, actually, or about a tenth of what Stuarts Point’s library costs.
This is not a lone example, either. All round the country you’ll find the same astonishingly inflated prices for buildings knocked up in a hurry under rush-rush-Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution, set up last year to hurl $16.2 billion into quick-quick building projects for schools to “save” us from a catastrophic recession that the Reserve Bank now admits was just one of our milder downturns.
This waste is worst in the $14 billion of that money that went on primary schools, which were given just a couple of months to ask for, plan and start building their choice of hall, library, shade or classroom.
And what you saw with Rudd’s disastrous free insulation scheme is now unfolding with these BER projects. Too much money chased too few builders, who naturally quoted mad prices for jobs they barely cared if they didn’t get.
So Eungai Public School in NSW spent $850,000 for just a two-room classroom. Berwick Lodge Primary, in Victoria, was quoted $200,000 by a Government project manager to move a sewer and stormwater drain - more than three times what private contractors told the principal the job was worth.
A Wollongong school couldn’t even buy a school hall for its $2.5 million, even though the one it was quoted was less than half the size of the hall a nearby Catholic school had built for half the price.
Nor does this scandal stop at the overcharging. Many schools asked for or were offered buildings they didn’t really need, and said yes only for fear of missing out on a freebie.
For instance, Yapeen Primary School, near Castlemaine, was given $150,000 of BER money even though it has just two students and may soon close.
Coincidentally, perhaps, the principal has twice stood as a Labor candidate.
The reports of overcharging and waste in this massive program, administered by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, are so overwhelming that the auditor-general is now investigating where the money went, and is also asking primary school principals to say in confidence whether they got value for these billions.
I’m yet to speak to a builder who thinks they did.
“I’d say a figure of $1000 a sq m is a very good ball-park figure (for school buildings),” the prominent head of one of the country’s biggest home builders told me, asking not to be identified.
“The price for this Building the Education Revolution stuff is phenomenally much higher than that. There’s been a feeding frenzy and people could charge what they liked.
“You could get a couple of houses off the shelf for a fraction of the price of what they’re paying for (a small library).”
The Opposition estimates that of the $16.2 billion being spent, as much as $9 billion will be frittered away, and no one can be sure that’s not just spin. After all, this Government’s mismanagement of spending already rivals anything Gough Whitlam ever perpetrated.
The Herald Sun’s s front page report yesterday on the latest scheme to be rorted came almost as a comic interlude, since the Government’s Solar Hot Water Rebate - another “stimulus” package - at least involves less than $1 billion (just) of your money.
Consider: here’s a “green” scheme that’s meant to pay $1600 a pop to install solar hot water systems in (only) private homes, but which instead pays for banks of up to 17 free hot water showers at a time for small football clubs like Koondrook-Barham’s, and without even hooking the units up to those feel-good solar panels.
Is anyone in Canberra looking after your money? Hello?
The answer, I fear, is no. In fact the carelessness with which this Government spends billions of our now-vanished national savings on rubbish is so monumental that few voters seem able to grasp it.
Take the utter ****-up the Government made of its signature “stimulus” package - its plan to stick free insulation into the homes of people who hadn’t thought it worth their own good money.
On Wednesday, while most of the Canberra press gallery was off reporting on the Indonesian President’s visit, Greg Combet, the Assistant Minister for Energy Efficiency and for Fixing Government Disasters, finally slipped out the statistics that show the staggering scale of this waste.
I’ll spare you the adjectives, and give you just the numbers that tell the tale.
Homes installed: 1,200,000.
Cost so far: $1.5 billion.
Installers killed: 4.
Homes given bad insulation: 160,000.
Homes now at risk of fire: 78,500.
Homes burned: 105
Homes at risk of electrification: 1500.
Homes with incomplete insulation: 95,000.
Homes with fraudulent installations: 5000.
THAT adds up to about 340,000 homes given bad, dangerous, incomplete or even non-existent insulation, including 50,000 now so dangerous that Combet says they must have the stuff the Government installed ripped out or protected by the installation of safety switches.
The cost of fixing up this disaster? Perhaps $450 million, warns the National Electrical Contractors Association, not including the $41 million the Government is paying to retrain the people it threw out of work when it belatedly scrapped its mad scheme.
Your money again. What an incredible, incredible waste.
Oh, but we meant well, cries the Government. We had to spend all this to save you from the recession.
Oh, really? Sinclair Davidson, professor of institutional economics at RMIT University, has compared the size of Rudd’s “stimulus” spending to those of other developed countries, and concludes: “The Australian stimulus was massive compared to most other OECD economies while our unemployment performance was average.
“As I keep saying, the Government panicked and spent far too much money that we now know was poorly allocated on projects that were not carefully thought through.”
True. Your billions have gone on insulation that’s now being removed, and some schools that should be closed.
It’s gone on “cash splashes” that went down the pokies, and on pink batts that sent houses up in smoke.
It’s gone on massive margins charged by name-my-own price builders and on insulation shonks who charged for work they never did.
It’s gone on Saturday showers for footballers, and on rush orders for Chinese exporters wondering who’d need so much of their shoddy stuff so fast.
Oh, but there’s one statistic I haven’t yet given. How many ministers have lost their jobs for sending your cash to the scheizenhausen?
But you know. It’s zero.
Andrew Bolt
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 07:11am
THINK you must now have heard the worst of Kevin Rudd’s colossal waste of your billions?
Think nothing could top Rudd’s spending $1.5 billion on free insulation so dodgy that he must spend an estimated $450 million more to pull it out or make it safe?
Then check out this shack above.
It’s actually a school library being built at Stuarts Point with cash from perhaps the most scandalously wasteful of all the Rudd Government’s “stimulus” packages.
How much would you pay for it, do you think? $150,000? $200,000, tops?
Ha! Try $931,000, sucker. And that’s out of your pocket, too.
For a contrast, check what you’d get for less than a quarter of the price if the school had cut out the Government middlemen and simply picked a whole house off the shelf from a builder.
Ezyhomes, for instance, offers a 182sq m house called the Outlook (below), with a huge central area just right for a reading or teaching area, as well as three bedrooms you could use for the books, or knock out to make bigger spaces. Add toilets, kitchen and veranda and you’d still have change from $220,000.
Or check what the Australian Construction Handbook of 2008 says you should actually pay for a single-storey primary school building - around $1300 per square metre, actually, or about a tenth of what Stuarts Point’s library costs.
This is not a lone example, either. All round the country you’ll find the same astonishingly inflated prices for buildings knocked up in a hurry under rush-rush-Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution, set up last year to hurl $16.2 billion into quick-quick building projects for schools to “save” us from a catastrophic recession that the Reserve Bank now admits was just one of our milder downturns.
This waste is worst in the $14 billion of that money that went on primary schools, which were given just a couple of months to ask for, plan and start building their choice of hall, library, shade or classroom.
And what you saw with Rudd’s disastrous free insulation scheme is now unfolding with these BER projects. Too much money chased too few builders, who naturally quoted mad prices for jobs they barely cared if they didn’t get.
So Eungai Public School in NSW spent $850,000 for just a two-room classroom. Berwick Lodge Primary, in Victoria, was quoted $200,000 by a Government project manager to move a sewer and stormwater drain - more than three times what private contractors told the principal the job was worth.
A Wollongong school couldn’t even buy a school hall for its $2.5 million, even though the one it was quoted was less than half the size of the hall a nearby Catholic school had built for half the price.
Nor does this scandal stop at the overcharging. Many schools asked for or were offered buildings they didn’t really need, and said yes only for fear of missing out on a freebie.
For instance, Yapeen Primary School, near Castlemaine, was given $150,000 of BER money even though it has just two students and may soon close.
Coincidentally, perhaps, the principal has twice stood as a Labor candidate.
The reports of overcharging and waste in this massive program, administered by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, are so overwhelming that the auditor-general is now investigating where the money went, and is also asking primary school principals to say in confidence whether they got value for these billions.
I’m yet to speak to a builder who thinks they did.
“I’d say a figure of $1000 a sq m is a very good ball-park figure (for school buildings),” the prominent head of one of the country’s biggest home builders told me, asking not to be identified.
“The price for this Building the Education Revolution stuff is phenomenally much higher than that. There’s been a feeding frenzy and people could charge what they liked.
“You could get a couple of houses off the shelf for a fraction of the price of what they’re paying for (a small library).”
The Opposition estimates that of the $16.2 billion being spent, as much as $9 billion will be frittered away, and no one can be sure that’s not just spin. After all, this Government’s mismanagement of spending already rivals anything Gough Whitlam ever perpetrated.
The Herald Sun’s s front page report yesterday on the latest scheme to be rorted came almost as a comic interlude, since the Government’s Solar Hot Water Rebate - another “stimulus” package - at least involves less than $1 billion (just) of your money.
Consider: here’s a “green” scheme that’s meant to pay $1600 a pop to install solar hot water systems in (only) private homes, but which instead pays for banks of up to 17 free hot water showers at a time for small football clubs like Koondrook-Barham’s, and without even hooking the units up to those feel-good solar panels.
Is anyone in Canberra looking after your money? Hello?
The answer, I fear, is no. In fact the carelessness with which this Government spends billions of our now-vanished national savings on rubbish is so monumental that few voters seem able to grasp it.
Take the utter ****-up the Government made of its signature “stimulus” package - its plan to stick free insulation into the homes of people who hadn’t thought it worth their own good money.
On Wednesday, while most of the Canberra press gallery was off reporting on the Indonesian President’s visit, Greg Combet, the Assistant Minister for Energy Efficiency and for Fixing Government Disasters, finally slipped out the statistics that show the staggering scale of this waste.
I’ll spare you the adjectives, and give you just the numbers that tell the tale.
Homes installed: 1,200,000.
Cost so far: $1.5 billion.
Installers killed: 4.
Homes given bad insulation: 160,000.
Homes now at risk of fire: 78,500.
Homes burned: 105
Homes at risk of electrification: 1500.
Homes with incomplete insulation: 95,000.
Homes with fraudulent installations: 5000.
THAT adds up to about 340,000 homes given bad, dangerous, incomplete or even non-existent insulation, including 50,000 now so dangerous that Combet says they must have the stuff the Government installed ripped out or protected by the installation of safety switches.
The cost of fixing up this disaster? Perhaps $450 million, warns the National Electrical Contractors Association, not including the $41 million the Government is paying to retrain the people it threw out of work when it belatedly scrapped its mad scheme.
Your money again. What an incredible, incredible waste.
Oh, but we meant well, cries the Government. We had to spend all this to save you from the recession.
Oh, really? Sinclair Davidson, professor of institutional economics at RMIT University, has compared the size of Rudd’s “stimulus” spending to those of other developed countries, and concludes: “The Australian stimulus was massive compared to most other OECD economies while our unemployment performance was average.
“As I keep saying, the Government panicked and spent far too much money that we now know was poorly allocated on projects that were not carefully thought through.”
True. Your billions have gone on insulation that’s now being removed, and some schools that should be closed.
It’s gone on “cash splashes” that went down the pokies, and on pink batts that sent houses up in smoke.
It’s gone on massive margins charged by name-my-own price builders and on insulation shonks who charged for work they never did.
It’s gone on Saturday showers for footballers, and on rush orders for Chinese exporters wondering who’d need so much of their shoddy stuff so fast.
Oh, but there’s one statistic I haven’t yet given. How many ministers have lost their jobs for sending your cash to the scheizenhausen?
But you know. It’s zero.
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Excellent post bunyip. It doesn't augur well for the implementation of the health reform package. The chances of much of this money filtering through to the work face is remote.
It shows what happens when we trust economic amateurs to run the Government. Cost efficiency is not in their vocabulary.
It shows what happens when we trust economic amateurs to run the Government. Cost efficiency is not in their vocabulary.
The same thought occurred to me too Calliope. Given the appalling incompetence of the Rudd government in their handling of their various policies, reforms, and stimulus packages etc, it's difficult to feel confident of their ability to efficiently implement their health reform package. Or anything else for that matter.
So_Cynical
The Contrarian Averager
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Trainspotter im wondering if you have ever heard of something called the Australian Green house office? im guessing you haven't so let me fill you in a little...The AGO was created by the Howard Govt in its first term as basically a political move to show the electorate that the govt was serious about GHG issues and spending money to do something about it....while ignoring Kyoto
This office handed out grants to projects totalling over 200 mill from memory, and according to the linked document, spent around 50 million annually for 5 years on public servants....running a program. giving away money to organisations that already had money so they could produce plans for projects that never reduced GHG's....over 400 million spent and ZERO result.
Just for the record.
http://www.environment.gov.au/about/publications/budget/2004/paes/pubs/ago.pdf
This thread is about Rudd, not Howard.
The Howard government is no longer in power. Rudd is.
Nobody but a fool would be happy with the way Rudd is splashing money around like a drunken sailor.
Nobody but a fool would be happy with his handling of the illegal immigration issue.
Nobody but a fool would be happy that many millions of dollars of the stimulation package went into the pokies.
Nobody but a fool would be happy that tens of millions of dollars of the economic stimulation money went overseas to people who no longer live in Australia.
Nobody but a fool would be happy that our money is being used to buy unneeded school buildings at three or four times the normal price.
Nobody but a fool would be happy with the total stuff up and enormous expense of the home insulation scheme.
Rather than trying to defend Rudd while you throw stones at a previous government that's no longer in power, perhaps a more responsible attitude would be to ask yourself if you're happy with Rudd's performance so far.
So_Cynical
The Contrarian Averager
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Overall yes...would be helpful if the senate would actually pass some of the Govt's legislative agenda...pretty hard to get any major reforms happening without the senate at-least cooperating a little....but that's politics.
trainspotter, those 154 ETS staff together with another 146 have been transferrd to help sort out the HOME INSULATION DEBACLE, so they are now gainfully employed, at a cost of course to the tax payer.
Thank goodness we have a watch dog senate and not a lap dog senate to scrutinize and monitor the good from the bad Rudd policies otherwise we could be in even worse cicumstances than we are now. I understand the senate has passed more than 80% of the Governments legislative agenda. What do expect 100%? I hope not!!!!!!
Rudd keeps demanding the senate gets out of the way. What does Rudd want? A DICTATORSHIP. Must I remind you we live in a democracy. He would like nothing more than to be Emperor Rudd and treat our citizens like he treats his staff.
Yup exactly..... Just look at NSW state govt.
