Page 2642 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 2 July 2008
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Usually renters tend to have a small bar heater in one room and, if you want to go to the loo or down the corridor or to the kitchen, you have got to put on a beanie and gloves to walk down the corridor in wintertime because the houses are cold and the fellow with the little bar heater in his bedroom is in fact very effectively heating the outside air.
Those issues, unfortunately, will not be addressed by this measure. The issue about the quality of Canberra’s housing stock will be addressed by modifications to that housing stock, which is one of the impetuses for the Green-backed scheme that the Canberra Liberals put forward at the last election; it was to provide an opportunity for people to improve the quality of the housing stock and to repay the cost of that through their energy bills. A landlord could have insulated a house or fixed up the gaps in a house and things like that. They may have put the rent up but the tenant would have had lower energy bills, which would compensate for the rent going up.
This is what the scheme was about and the only way we will address the emissions from our poor housing stock is to go to the base and look at why our housing stock performs so poorly. It is uninsulated or under-insulated; there are gaps everywhere that need to be addressed; they have old and antiquated hot water systems; and landlords do not have any motivation for changing them to more efficient ones because they are not paying the bills. And until we address those issues, we will not address the issue of emissions from our housing stock.
It is interesting to note that a large proportion of our rental housing stock in the ACT is ACT Housing stock, which is appalling as well. There are some innovations that we have seen as part of the second appropriation bill, which I applaud; I think it should be rolled out a lot faster than the rate at which ACT Housing is allowed to roll it out by the government with its parsimonious attitude.
I think that this proposal unnecessarily adds to the cost of renting. The advice provided to me is that the cost of an energy efficiency audit ranges from something between $150 and $500, depending on the size and complexity of the house, but a three or four-bedroom house would cost somewhere between $200 and $250.
The thing is that that energy efficiency audit is voided every time someone does something like changing the structure of the house by adding a door or a window or even a skylight. You might be a landlord who says, “Okay, you have got a really dark corridor. I will put a skylight in it,” and you have just blown your $500 or your $250 that you have paid out for an energy efficiency audit. The next time you have to rent the property you have to go and get another one.
I want to see landlords and tenants and the government working to improve the quality of the rental stock in the ACT, in the same way as I want to see owners and the government improving the quality of the housing stock generally in the ACT. Unfortunately, this is not the way to do it.
However, the Canberra Liberals have been consistent in our opposition to this approach. I think it is hypocritical of the Stanhope government to oppose it, as they have on and off in the past, and then put it in their strategy but, when confronted with it, say, “No, the time is not right.” We have been talking about implementing our
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