KEVIN Rudd spent his first two years in power smashing stuff.
Now, in this election year, he's spending up to $1 billion of your money to fix the damage. That's right: Rudd is spending at least $1 billion to fix the havoc he's unleashed by handing out free insulation, splurging on overpriced school buildings, relaxing boat people laws, letting in an unsustainable 300,000 people a year and more. Oh, I know. You think I'm far too hard on a Prime Minister with the air of a particularly methodical Christian dentist. But one disillusioned day you will hear from many who now work with him that how Rudd seems is bizarrely different to how he is.
I don't just mean that this publicly prissy churchgoer is privately a foul-mouthed, arrogant, paranoid and abusive control freak, but that many of his brightest ideas swiftly flop.
The truth is his uncanny skill at spinning has so far saved Rudd's reputation as a manager. But check the substance rather than the image and you find he already qualifies as possibly the most incompetent prime minister since World War II. And, no, I haven't forgotten Whitlam.
Take Monday's announcement that his Government will now spend another $14 million on a taskforce to tackle the massive rorting of its $16.2 billion school stimulus scheme.
This so-called "Building the Education Revolution" spendathon was always destined to be a colossal waste. To spend so much so fast on school halls, shade-cloths and a few classrooms and libraries was to blow a fortune on fripperies that had little to do with making children smarter or more civilised.
But even I couldn't predict the scandalous rorting which followed. In NSW, for instance, builders have charged at least $800,000 a time for more than 40 covered outdoor learning areas which official state government costings say should cost just $250,000.
From Perth to Sydney, schools have complained of receiving trash for your cash - useless canteens at half the size for twice the price, libraries with no shelves or with heating that would kill if the windows were closed; single classrooms costing double what you'd pay for a package home; and fire-fighting tanks that weren't asked for. In Victoria, even a dying school with just two children was given $150,000, and from everywhere came complaints that BER developers were charging "management fees" of up to 21 per cent.
That's all your money, folks. Blown in what some now call the Builders' Early Retirement fund.
Now the Government is spending even more of your money - $14 million - on a taskforce to stop the looting of what's left of our $16.2 billion. Or to seem to.
Why did Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard only now announce this "safeguard" when it's been clear for months that your taxes were being wasted like never before in our history?
Three reasons, all squalid. First, Channel 7 last weekend mainstreamed this scandal, running a devastating report on its Sunday Night current affairs show.
Second, it's election year, and setting up a taskforce makes it seem like you're dealing with a problem, at least for now.
And, thirdly, although Gillard refuses to admit it she has got an advance report on this BER racket from the Auditor General that is likely to be devastating, and it's a fair bet she set up her taskforce to short-circuit the criticism she'll get when it's released.
This BER rorting is the biggest waste by Rudd so far, with anything up to $8 billion thrown away. But the more graphic symbol of his incompetence - of having to spend millions to fix what he caused by spending billions - is his free insulation scheme.
Again, it didn't make sense from the start for Rudd to spend $2.5 billion of your money to install free insulation in the homes of people who thought it wasn't worth doing with their own cash.
It's even crazier now we know Rudd barged ahead even after his own department was warned in writing a year ago that rushing out these freebies could attract shysters, burn down houses and kill people.
It all happened, just as Rudd was warned, with four installers now dead, 120 homes set on fire and more than 300,000 houses fitted with potentially lethal, incomplete or near-useless junk.
TO fix the disaster and compensate the losers, the Government may now have to spend anything up to $1 billion, with the National Electrical Contractors Association estimating repairs alone could cost $450 million.
It also means taxpayers must pay millions to take out insulation that Rudd made them pay millions to put in. It couldn't get crazier.
Correction. It already has. See, Rudd meant this giveaway to "stimulate" the economy and put people in jobs. But the day before Easter (a good time to bury bad news) his Government announced, in effect, that his insulation scheme had killed off the very industry he'd meant it to help.
The Government said it would now give insulation manufacturers $15 million to help them stockpile all the batts and foil they can no longer sell, now that Rudd's scheme has stuck the stuff in a million more ceilings. Those stockpiles of unsaleable batts are a clear sign that these once healthy businesses have been poleaxed.
Indeed, an industry which once predicted Rudd's free insulation plan would create 4000 jobs now says its collapse has cost the jobs of 6000.
Or even 8000, says Dandenong's Fletcher Insulation, which warns that every insulation manufacturer may shut this year, at least temporarily.
That's why Rudd has spent another $41 million of your money to help retrain the people sacked from an industry he spent billions to "stimulate".
And still this lunatic incompetence doesn't end. To fix this mess before the election, Rudd has switched his entire emissions trading team on to it.
Remember them? They're the 154 public servants Rudd originally hired to work on what until this year he called "the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time" - the man-made global warming he told us his great new green tax on everything would help stop.
But that tax is now blocked in the Senate, and public support for it is falling like a batt out of hell, so Rudd has put "the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time" on the backburner, and set his $57 million-a-year team of planet-savers to work on insulation instead. And still this comedy is not done.
Rudd last weekend froze the process ing of refugee applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to stop the tide of boats he unleashed by weakening our boat people laws two years ago.
Boat people were a problem John Howard had fixed, cutting arrivals to just 18 boats over six years. Rudd unfixed that problem by going soft, so he's now luring in more than 10 boats a month.
THE Christmas Island detention centre is filled to bursting, and fixing this will cost hundreds of millions more of your dollars, with the 2000 people who've arrived just this year costing some $80,000 each to process.
Then there's the whole new "Department of Population" Rudd abruptly created this month to hose down the alarm he'd raised by not only letting in a record 300,000 immigrants last year, but by then happily endorsing predictions that our population will explode to 36 million by 2050.
And we still don't know how much in total we must pay for all Rudd's other failures - FuelWatch, Grocery Watch, the scrapped tender of his first broadband scheme, the lobbying for his new pan-Asian body, the botched Green Loans plan, the rorted solar hot water scheme, the "Ideas Summit" fiasco and the new nuclear disarmament body.
Still, more amazing than this waste is that Rudd retains the air of a man who knows just what he's doing, and is across every detail.
Watch him now sell his latest multi-billion-dollar plan - a health shakeup that Ken Baxter, former head of the premier's department in Victoria and NSW, warns will create a bureaucratic monster that will eat money. But look at Rudd. See how assured and competent he seems, even as his last schemes still fall around his ears? Amazing gift, that, and you're paying billions for it.
Andrew Bolt From: Herald Sun April 13, 2010 7:57PM
