Page 1666 - Week 06 - Thursday, 20 May 1993
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MRS GRASSBY: Unfortunately, they are not. In fact, a lot of our older Housing Trust houses do have them and I think it should be looking at ways of getting rid of them. We should be leading the field in getting rid of those sorts of things, and, of course, putting better insulation into houses.
I remember that when I became Minister for Housing I was quite shocked to find out that most of our Housing Trust houses did not even have carpet in them. One of my first moves was to have carpet put into Housing Trust houses. If you are in a Housing Trust house, normally it is because you cannot afford other types of housing, and if you have young children you definitely need carpet on the floor. Some of them have just cement floors. I found it quite horrifying when I went through some of those Housing Trust houses. With electric heating in a room that has a cement floor, as the heat builds up you get condensation on the walls and on the windows. If you have small children who have asthma or some sort of chest problem, you will find that it gets a lot worse in these conditions. Wood-burning stoves that do not have fans on them, and which do not have good ventilation, do exactly the same thing. I would hope that in the future we will consider saying that in very low areas where the smoke does not get away we will ban wood stoves and open fires. With insulation and better siting of houses we might not need to do this.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (12.14), in reply: Madam Speaker, in one respect this is a very sensitive issue to me. It brings back memories of an election campaign something like 20 years ago, and not a very successful one, I might say. I arrived in a little north Queensland town once and a great number of signs were being waved at me, saying "Fire Wood". I am not suggesting that that should be used on any occasion in this place.
Mr Moore: The one that I am worried about is "Fuel Wood".
MR WOOD: Yes. That is what prompted that memory, Mr Moore. That apart, there are only, I think, good responses in the Assembly today to the good responses by the Government to this report. Comment has been made about banning wood-burning stoves. As Mr Kaine or Mr Moore, one or the other, said, it is an issue that is about to arise again as we move into winter. The next debate today, after question time, will be on the West Belconnen report, and there is a recommendation coming up about air quality and microclimate. I will read a little bit from that. It says that, in view of the topography of the area and its location at the base of the drainage catchment, the whole area may be prone to local inversion layers such that air pollution levels are exacerbated and air temperature depressed. Accordingly, it is proposed that, as a precaution, the use of solid fuel-burning appliances should be prohibited in the development. West Belconnen has been approved and the bulldozers are now forming roads out there, so we come to the question of whether we ban wood-burning stoves in West Belconnen.
That, perhaps, is a debate that we should have in this Assembly. Maybe someone would like to raise that as an MPI. I would like to get discussion on this. Is it an equity issue? Do we deny people in that area putting in a wood-burning stove or an open fireplace? It is important. It is certainly an area that is going to be prone to that problem and we have two reports to this Assembly now saying that we should, in the circumstances, ban such stoves.
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