Page 713 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 5 April 2022
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the festival has provided an apt opportunity for this heritage-listed hotel to regain business as the economy opens up.
The pandemic has seen the world experience a temporary but possibly long-term process of de-globalisation as a result of travel restrictions and nervousness about holidaying overseas. Promoting our local, distinctive region to this domestic market, made unique by our heritage, is vital for tourism and hospitality to again be viable.
Heritage is about looking back, but it is also about looking forward. I would like now to talk about the emerging and critical job that we have ahead of us in climate-proofing our heritage assets. While we need to “conserve” our history, we do not necessarily want to “preserve” it, especially if it means we place unnecessary constraints on our ability to improve the sustainability of our heritage buildings. It would be a perverse outcome if we indeed preserved older heritage buildings so that they were adversely affected through very high energy bills, poor occupant comfort, and poor resilience in the face of a changing Canberra climate. A balance must be struck so that these buildings can retain their character and other attributes that heritage listing seeks to preserve, while being able to be adapted to suit the needs of present and future occupants.
No building is kept in its original form or use forever and, to spark your curiosity, I would like to share with you a fine example of adaptive re-use from the UK. The Tower of London was built 900 years ago. Over that time it has been used as a royal residence, as home to the Royal Mint, a menagerie, a records office, an armoury and a prison. This process has not needed to be costly or onerous, but it does require sensible reflection of how we can support building owners and the community to ensure that heritage is valued and celebrated, while ensuring that we continue to work to ensure that our built fabric is climate wise.
This may include enabling building owners to contribute to the ACT’s effort to cut greenhouse emissions from the built environment and reduce energy use. It may include enabling public heritage-listed buildings to meet community expectations with respect to sustainability; for example, by generating onsite solar power or being all-electric. It may include helping to truly conserve historic buildings by making them sustainable over the long term. In fact, this could extend their life by preventing them from becoming unfit for purpose; for example, by having unacceptably high energy costs. It may also include creating niche business opportunities in the skilled field of retrofitting historic buildings. For example, custom-window manufacturers can make high-performance windows that retain the appearance of the original windows.
It is important, of course, that any measures would be applied in sensible and sensitive ways to preserve our shared heritage values, while meeting the shared goals we are working towards within the parliamentary and governing agreement to shift to world’s best practice on climate-ready and environmentally sustainable buildings and net zero emissions for the ACT. It is early days in relation to these discussions, and I look forward to many conversations with my government colleagues and others around the room, as well as valued community partners, to bring this vision to life.
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