The exponential growth in solar PV and associated problems has attracted media and political attention.
In 2018, federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor warned his state counterparts lives were at risk from substandard solar panel installations. An audit of the Clean Energy Regulator by the Australian National Audit Office found there were potentially tens of thousands of badly installed and even unsafe rooftop systems. The regulator had inspected just 1.2% of rooftop installations.
It’s a nationwide problem
State and territory regulators are responsible for electrical safety. Only Victoria mandates an inspection of each installed system.
Last October, Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Graham Kingland said:
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And Minter Ellison offered the opinion that there was nothing unusual about ASIC paying Shipton’s tax advice bills stating: “In our experience, it is standard practice for an employer to cover the reasonable cost of tax advice (including tax filings) where an executive is relocating countries to take up a position. Typically, the employer would arrange that advice themselves, through their own advisers, and would validate the expenses (and their reasonableness) through their usual processes”.
The documents provided to the Parliamentary committee by ASIC show that in August this year it was asking the ANAO to take the Minter Ellison legal opinion into account together with advice from the Australian Government Solicitor which it said had found that it was “reasonable for ASIC to treat the Tax Expenses as expenses incurred on relocation within the mean of a (Remuneration Tribunal) determination”.
Faced with this predicament, ASIC actually canvassed having the Remuneration Tribunal make a retrospective determination to cover Crennan’s circumstances
The documentation also notes that the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) raised serious questions about the nature of the arrangement as early as August, last year, and specifically mentioned that the arrangements should only apply to “team members” and that “past examples demonstrated that ASIC had previously only approved reimbursement of one-off costs associated with the relocation of commission members, rather than providing “ongoing” rental assistance.
The ASIC documentation, filed as part of its response to questions raised by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics reveals that Crennan was asked to relocate from Sydney to Melbourne because of the resignation of former ASIC deputy chair, Peter Kell, and that as part of the arrangement he was being provided with a rental allowance o