Loft insulation: Australia's burning issue

An Australian government scheme to promote loft insulation is backfiring on the country's environment minister, former Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett

Julian Glover
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 February 2010 20.00 GMT
'How can we sleep when our beds are burning?" sang Peter Garrett in 1987, when he was vying with Michael Hutchence for the title of Australia's most famous rock star. Now, having joined the government as environment minister, the former singer with Midnight Oil has a very real fire to put out.
Garrett is a good man with an impossible task, trying to retain his street cred while doing all the boring but important things that junior environment ministers have to do, such as worrying about what people put in their loft space. He's behind a sensible scheme to encourage Aussies to insulate their homes. It's the sort of thing that British politicans back, too. Unfortunately, Garrett is now finding out the hard way what happens when the government pays cowboy builders to come round to your home.
Australians are used to ­finding scary things in their ­attics – ­funnel web spiders and tiger snakes, for instance – but not foil insulation that has been wired to the mains. Thanks to a federal government scheme, intended to cut energy use, thousands of homes may have been fitted with foil insulation that has been ­inadvertently nailed to nearby electrical wiring. Last week, one man died in a fire apparently caused by such an error.
Suddenly, insulation has lept from nowhere to the top of the political agenda, with the opposition calling on Garrett to resign. He is "inhabiting a different moral universe", says Tony Abbott, the leader of the Liberal party.
Since Abbott also not long ago described climate change as "total crap", some might ask whether it is Abbott, rather than Garrett, whose morals have gone askew. But at least he hasn't yet gone as far as his finance spokesman, who last week said insulation was nothing more than "the fluffy stuff that sits in the ceiling for rats and mice to urinate on". Those mice had better watch out when they pee.