Page 513 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 16 February 2005
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come in here with motions to support and further those things, you support them. If you think that we are not as good as our word, you watch this space. What was done before the election campaign by the Canberra Liberals was significant in terms of bringing the ACT forward. We had a mixed approach; there was a bit of carrot and there was a bit of stick. Dr Foskey’s proposal is entirely stick.
Dr Foskey talks the talk about educating people and getting people to understand. We know that, if people implement these things, they will be better off in the long run financially. But I am not going to whip the people of Canberra to a position where they must do this and they must do that. There has to be a combination of things, and what we brought forward at the last election campaign was a combination of those things that addressed not just the new housing stock but the 80 per cent of housing stock in the ACT which is not new—which, rather than being substandard in terms of energy efficiency and environmental friendliness, is sub-substandard. And there is nothing that is being proposed here today that will address anything to do with the existing housing stock.
The Canberra Liberals took policies to the last election that set very firm targets that we were prepared to set for ourselves. We would set them for ourselves as a government, not for individual households. Dr Foskey’s move today is about putting all the responsibility onto individual householders. We would provide information and education and government leadership. There would be some mandatory things, and the first of those—and I challenge this government to do this, because the Minister for Planning has been talking about doing this for a very long time—would be to improve the house energy rating system, the ACTHER system, to make it a five-star mandatory system by 1 July 2005.
That is a challenge for this government. They could do it tomorrow if they had the will. They have not done it. They probably will not do it. We would then move down the path of increasing that energy rating system as soon as possible after that to six stars—no one in the country has gone to six stars yet—and look at means of improving the ACTHER system beyond six stars. We would also make the ACTHER system open ended so that it can be reported that something has a six-star energy rating if it does. As it currently stands at the moment, if something has got a six-star energy rating, you cannot report it as that.
We also had a bit more stick, which was the mandating of the installation of solar hot water systems on all new homes. That is a significant step forward, which the government and the crossbenchers in the previous Assembly would not even contemplate; they were too frightened to do so. We had proposed a range of things, one of which was a voluntary system that would address not just new houses but the existing housing stock. It was called the “bluebell” rating scheme for Canberra houses, which is not on the green scale system.
That was proposed to be a voluntary scheme, as is the GreenStar rating scheme. Dr Foskey wants to turn it into a mandatory scheme. It will not work as a mandatory scheme. The experience in the United States, where the Green Building Council first established itself and established the GreenStar rating system, and in Europe has told us that mandating in commercial buildings does not work. In some ways what makes it work is the sense that we are doing something better than our competitor and we can flaunt that plaque or something that says that we are at the cutting edge and our
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