Page 891 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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these sorts of issues. This is not a new issue, as far as the Greens and I are concerned. In fact, the first people who lobbied me when I was a new MLA in the Seventh Assembly were people who were concerned about EER issues.
While I sincerely hope that my motion, or the motion as amended that will be passed, will help tenants, this is not a tenants’ issue. This is a public policy problem, in that we are building, in particular, apartments in Canberra which will not serve us well in the future. We have to hope that the apartments that we are building now will last for at least 50 years. In 50 years time the climate will be different. Minister Ramsay made a distinction between heatwaves and climate. The point is that in the next 50 years what we are talking about as heatwaves will be the climate, as he said. We can see this coming. The CSIRO has done the modelling. Instead of waiting for what is now a heatwave to become normal and then saying, “Oh, we should do something about it,” we really cannot wait for that; we need to build now for the future.
The ACF and the ANU recently released a report that showed that Canberra will have up to 110 days over 30 degrees by 2050 without climate action. Appreciably, the world as a whole is not taking climate action. Effectively, in Canberra, as they said, there will be no winter as we currently know it, so we really do need to change.
I am not really sure why the government wanted to cut out improvements to the energy efficiency standards from the work to stop the building of hot apartments, although I do appreciate and thank Minister Ramsay for updating us as to some of the changes that are starting to come through the long and slow COAG process. Part of my annoyance is because, as I said, I moved a motion along these lines eight years ago. We needed to start then so that we would not be continuing to build apartments which clearly are not going to work.
Every morning when I walk down to the bus, I walk past a new set of townhouses that are being built facing west, with floor-to-ceiling windows. We all know what is going to happen with them: they are going to be hot; they are going to run their air conditioning extensively. The point is that we know this is going to happen. We do not have to do it, and we need to take action to ensure that we do not build more housing with problems.
Thank you, minister, for telling us that you are already doing the work. The problem from my point of view is that this is what the government has been saying for the past decade. The relevant minister or ministerial council have always just been about to make enough progress so that it will all be sorted. But it actually has not happened.
As a point of clarification, Minister Ramsay, you suggested I had asked for a higher EER rating. That is not actually what I asked for. I asked for the ratings to work better for the Canberra climate. I do not think that the purpose is to go higher if we are not going in the right direction. We need to look at the future. As I said, the buildings that we are building should be around for the next 50 years at least. We need to look at how the climate is going to change over that period of time. Our wonderful national institution the CSIRO has done the work to tell us what it is likely to be. We need to look at that and build buildings that will work for that.
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