Page 3109 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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shire councillors come up with a good idea that we should make a certain form of insulation compulsory or we should have two-inch gaps or three-inch gaps or one variation or another. They may all make sense, and what can happen over time is that you move dramatically away from uniformity.
There could be a solution, and that is regional variations. There was an interjection from Mr Duby, while Mr Jensen was speaking, that the Cooktown building code would be inappropriate for Canberra, and we would all agree with that. There may be scope for incorporating some of Mr Jensen's suggestions, which are sensible, by way of annexes or regional variations to uniformity. But we have to be careful to resist the temptation, at the level of a small government in the Territory, of coming up with a bright idea and imposing it in the building code.
If every State and Territory did that, we would very quickly be in the position where we would depart from uniformity. Sadly, that has been the case historically in Australia. We had uniformity in the Companies Act for a period when uniform codes were passed in the sixties. As we all know, different States made what were seen to be sensible amendments to deal with local problems, and over time we drifted away from that uniformity.
In my view and in the Government's view, the push for uniformity in this area is so strongly in the national interest that it is the desirable course of action. Adjustments to the building code to deal with what may well be seen to be good ideas at the time have to be very carefully examined and dealt with in the context of uniformity and in the context of annexes that will deal with regional variations.
Mr Jensen indicated the fairly dramatic statistics on the cost and the effort of heating houses in Canberra, and we may have some degree of national uniformity on a code that would apply for cold climates. Again, the builder in Canberra could confidently build for our region - for Queanbeyan, Yass, Goulburn, the cold inland part of the plains country. For the Canberra builder building down the coast, there would be a different regional variation for coastal climatic conditions.
The temptation to come up with bright ideas and move away from a uniform code is something that needs to be looked at very cautiously, if we are going to depart from this hard-won uniformity. It will not involve just the ideas of members of State parliaments or Territory assemblies; potentially, it will involve the ideas of hundreds of shire councils and municipal councils and regional local government bodies around Australia.
We will get back very quickly to the mish-mash of different regulations and standards that can mean that across a local government boundary line, let alone a State or Territory border, we have different regulations applying. Uniformity
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