Page 2318 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
advocate at that forum and in the various ministerial councils. I think that if our ministers do not advocate there, they are bereft in their duties. This is something they should be doing.
My motion refers to advocating for funds to improve methodologies for data collection on built houses. This is something the HIA has been talking about for a long time. We need to do some more ground truthing. The energy efficiency ratings at present are done on physical simulations as to how a house will work, and hopefully they are correct, but we need to put a bit of work into comparing what you get out of an energy rating from the simulation, as we do at present, with building houses and actually seeing what they do in practice. We need some resources to do that. The HIA has been calling for that for years, and I think it would be great if the ACT was prepared to put its voice behind that.
The other thing I refer to is more appropriate climate data. We are probably all aware that the climate is changing and that there is certainly a widespread belief that climate change is happening. However, energy efficiency ratings are done on the basis of the climate in the past. Any new house we are building is going to be built for the climate in the future. Britain have undertaken an exercise of looking at the climate they expect in the future, so that they can rate their houses, design their houses—maybe that is a better way to put it—for the climate they expect the houses to be operating in, not last century’s climate. That is what I am talking about here. I am not talking about higher standards; I am talking about getting it better.
What I am talking about really is that it is clear that energy efficiency ratings are now accepted. We have had a lot of stories about them in the press because people in Canberra have been very concerned that a lot of them are dodgy and wrong. And, yes, I accept that the government is doing work to improve that. But there is more to do. We can see the impact of energy efficiency ratings on pricing—three per cent extra for an additional star rating. People in Canberra know this stuff is important, and they expect us to provide the information to them in an accurate form, in a form which gives them all the information. We are not doing that for them right now.
We need to start going to the next level and look at what consumers want to know. What they want to know is: “How much energy is it going to take to run my house?” So we need what we have got at present, which is the rating per square metre. We need to do a little bit of maths to multiply the square metres with the size of the house, and we need to add on the things that make a lot of difference as well. Your heating and cooling systems and your hot-water system come with energy ratings. Okay, some of the very old ones do not, but more and more of them do. They may not still have their label on, but the commonwealth government do have a website with a huge list of all the appliances that they have been rating. What we are talking about is not hard; it is just something that would make the system a lot more workable for the people out there.
In terms of amending the sale of premises act, I should probably take up Mr Seselja’s suggestion. It was something we talked about in 2009 and I thought that the government at that time said: “No, don’t amend this because we’re going to do it. As a part of the COAG process, we’re going to do it.” That was what the government
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video