Australian top economic advisor - Treasury

Comments on Henry Ergas "Energy efficient, benefit deficient", 26/02/2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/energy-efficientbenefit-deficient/story-e6frg6zo-1225834522960

The article starts with the following:

"EVEN if the pink batt program hadn't been bungled, it was a waste of money.
There is a forecast Treasury got right last year: that the government subsidies for insulation would create jobs for workers with few skills and virtually no training. Pity that combination proved fatal, but then again, as Tom Lehrer famously put it: " `Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."
What is Treasury's department, however, is that the subsidies are such poor public policy. That four young people are dead, and thousands of homes seriously exposed to the risk of fire, is tragic; that this happened because of a program that lacks any credible rationale is a scandal.
That program has been shut down, of course, along with the solar panel subsidies.
But it forms part of a bewildering range of commonwealth, state and territory initiatives aimed at promoting energy efficiency, most of which remain in place, and additional measures, replacing those cancelled, have been promised. Yet not one of those initiatives would pass a credible cost-benefit test."

This is what our top national economic advisor has done!

Remember the famous advice on tackling the recession: go early, go hard, go household?

That was probably underlying the cash handouts, including to those left here for overseas and had already been dead.