Page 458 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
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That has been rendered very difficult by cheap imports from Taiwan and the lack of any real business incentives to those fabricators. I will not name them. I happen to be the solicitor for one such firm. There is another firm in this Territory involved in wood stove sales, for which I also happen to be solicitor and which will not be named - - -
A member: Currently?
MR COLLAERY: No. It imports stoves from Europe, and those stoves are extremely efficient by comparison with some of the Taiwanese products being dumped on the ACT market. There is a difference in the quality of the cast metal, and there are a number of implications that we could look at overall in concert with this study to determine whether we could not have some non-emission industry base to service our own needs, to fabricate our own catalytic converters and to put a business end as well to our environment objectives.
Mr Speaker, the subject of housing design standards and passive solar construction has been around since I came to Canberra in 1970, yet if you go to the new suburbs with all those squiggly streets you still notice the houses facing in some of the most absurd directions. They are facing west and they are facing south. We have seen the suburb of Isaacs develop and, of course, we all know that there is a frost hollow there. Garran similarly has a frost hollow problem. Hawkesbury Crescent turned into a furnace until there was a tree canopy.
There has been an extraordinary and signal lack of foresight and planning in this Territory on passive solar design for housing, a failure by a very informed professional body at the NCDC to properly lead the community, and a failure by successive Ministers to provide incentives by way of stamp duty deductions and the like for people to site their houses properly on blocks and to ensure that there is some incentive for wall panelling insulation and for maximum exposure to the northern elevations of the sun for winter and summer.
Mr Speaker, this would be a topic that I am sure you would be fond of yourself, given your own commitment in this area. However, it is all very well for us to be committed here, but I am sure that most of us live in houses and units that have been sited in the wrong direction. That comes back to town planning, the size of blocks and matters that will involve an integration of some of the design standard recommendations from this committee and other committees of this Assembly.
A member: Yes, knock them down and build them properly.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Speaker, the ALP finds this topic amusing, and of course we know that we have had a succession of ALP Ministers governing this Territory for years whilst we
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