Page 1681 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 May 2013
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There are also improvements to the estate development code, and these include: facilitating passive solar by better block orientation; an improved focus on active and sustainable transport by better allowing for public transport infrastructure and shared path networks; improved minimum requirements for common areas like parks, paths, landscaping and parking—for example, making verge widths wider to better allow for street trees; an improved infrastructure development agreement process with government agencies; and the introduction of an integrated development parcel to better ensure residential amenity and solar access.
I would like to focus a little more on the solar aspects I mentioned. There was an item in the previous Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement of 2008 to mandate passive solar orientation for all new residential homes and subdivisions and to legislate for improved solar access rights. These were incorporated into the agreement, and that, in part, reflected community expectation of action on climate change as well as a general acknowledgement that these sorts of things make for both better quality and more comfortable homes. We now have climate change targets which were legislated in 2010, but these changes to planning codes were complex and thus have taken much longer to develop. In fact, there is still more work to be done to legislate for solar rights in situations which do not involve new houses.
This variation thus includes these key provisions around mandatory passive solar orientation and increased solar rights for residential homes and subdivision solar access, which stem from the 2008 parliamentary agreement. Of course, the Greens are pleased that solar considerations will be embedded in our planning laws. We need to design our homes in a way that makes sense in their environmental context to maximise solar gain in winter and reduce our energy use. There are now great examples of builders that have been doing this successfully, and as we proceed the industry is learning how to do this better.
I also note that a review of the territory plan to take into account greenhouse gas reduction targets, as stipulated in the 2012 parliamentary agreement, is still to come, and is necessary to better ensure that we can meet our reduction targets in years to come.
Coming back to DV306 and the decisions for today, we now find ourselves in a very interesting situation. The legislation around draft variations is such that at this stage there are only three things the Assembly can do today: reject the whole variation and all the work that has been done over the past four years; propose deleting individual clauses, specifically rules and criteria; or let the variation go through to commence on 27 May.
Given the significant improvements to the current residential codes and rules which I have just outlined, I am loath to send the whole lot back to the drawing board, given that there is unlikely to be consensus on exactly what changes need to be made, and that without this variation being approved today we lose any improvements in sustainability and building for our future energy and transport needs. On balance, it is clear that there are probably only around five to 10 pages of concern from a 300-page document that overall has a huge range of positive outcomes across the codes.
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