Page 1617 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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However, the potential impacts of a reasonably early implementation of energy efficient standard will be mitigated by the activities happening in other jurisdictions. My office’s discussions with representatives from industries and trade bodies such as the Master Plumbers Association indicate that the stakeholders are already getting prepared. The fact that the ACT has stayed still while other jurisdictions have pressed ahead with these changes means that we can now introduce these measures without significant delay.
The bill addresses a problem which has existed for too long in the ACT. While other jurisdictions in Australia have taken steps to phase out inefficient hot-water systems, the ACT has stayed still. Western Australia introduced similar standards to those in my bill in 2006. Queensland banned the installation of electric hot-water systems in all new homes from 2006, and it is beginning a phase-out of electric hot-water systems from existing houses next year. Similar legislation to this bill has also been in place in South Australia since mid-2008.
It is disappointing that the ACT has not been one of the leading jurisdictions to take steps to fix this problem. Because of this, we have found that some individual property developers have already started taking steps to act on this. For example, the Village Building Company’s developments in west Macgregor all have solar hot-water systems as a standard inclusion. However, not all builders, architects and homeowners are aware of sustainability issues, so we cannot just rely on them to take the lead. The government needs to set an efficiency standard and apply it territory wide; otherwise more and more time goes by, greenhouse gases are created and money is wasted while we could have taken simple action to address this problem.
I am conscious that I am introducing this bill in the midst of other discussions about hot-water system efficiencies which are taking place at the national level. At the end of last year, the Ministerial Council on Energy introduced a national hot-water strategic framework, which forms part of the national framework for energy efficiency. The hot-water strategic framework envisages a hot-water standard similar to the one in my bill. The Greens certainly believe that an urgent, comprehensive national response which mandates strict energy efficiency standards is an important step.
Unfortunately, it could be overly optimistic to expect that the ministerial council or COAG would implement these measures swiftly. A quick look at the history of these cooperative bodies shows that sometimes cooperation does not actually progress further than talking. Items sometimes fall off the agenda or are lost altogether. For example, in 2004, COAG committed to implement the stage 1 measures of the national framework for energy efficiency. They said it would be done within three years. It is now 2009 and these measures have not yet been implemented. In fact, the Ministerial Council on Energy has been talking about energy efficiency ever since it was established in 2001, eight years ago. It produced an energy efficiency discussion paper in 2004, but has not yet implemented its recommendations. We all know that energy efficiency is a low hanging fruit, but unfortunately I am not sure that we can rely on the ministerial council or COAG to go ahead and pick the fruit.
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